What is compulsory education? "What remains after you have forgotten everything" is its true purpose.

Don't be fooled by "you never use studying in the real world"

As adults, the exact same phrase invariably comes up: "I haven't used a single thing I learned in school in my current job." In fact, most people don't remember the majority of what they learned in compulsory education. Yet, that is the very design of education. Education is not about making people memorize things. It is what remains in the brain when you think you have forgotten everything you learned—that is the essence of education.

The purpose of compulsory education is not to leave behind memories, but "patterns of thinking."

The ability to take a bird's-eye view of things and accurately assess a situation—and the level of abstraction—is fundamentally correlated with the amount of information. That is precisely why cramming is necessary during the first half of compulsory education. It is only natural that cramming is boring; it is the building of a foundation, done while children are still unable to assess situations, so that they will have multiple choices when they become adults. The reason the state does not bother to teach people how to make money or practical knowledge is for the same reason. Knowledge that immediately translates into livelihood can be left to the private sector. What the state should shoulder, even using tax money, as a vital foundation of the nation-state, is a much more foundational part.

Science, mathematics, and the Japanese language are all "instruction manuals for the world."

The images of molecular and atomic structures learned in science, as well as their orbiting paths, directly connect to an understanding of the structure of the solar system and the universe. Even if the details are forgotten, only the sense that things have structure remains. Mathematics is the same. More important than the formulas themselves is the fact that over the course of ten years, one undergoes repeated training in a thought process: discovering regularities from immediate phenomena, abstracting them into formulas, and applying them. Japanese language, classical Japanese, and classical Chinese make people recognize their identity as an ethnic group using the same language, while social studies establishes time and space axes within the brain. Even if the details of history are not remembered, a sense that there is a grand current in this world and the orbital paths of each ethnic group's time axis remain. All of these can be said to be a common instruction manual for deciphering the world.

 Another face of compulsory education is "sorting" and "self-realization"

Compulsory education has another purpose that is rarely discussed. That is sorting and self-realization. Whether one is science-oriented or humanities-oriented, a leader or a supporter within a group—the framework of school is not merely a place to entertain children, but also a mechanism to make them aware of their respective traits and to achieve a bottom-up elevation of society as a whole. Creating a society where everyone can read and write and make a certain level of judgment is in itself a major purpose for the nation.

Precisely because it is an era of diversification, a "common language" is necessary.

There was a time when people watched the same TV shows and shared the same topics of conversation. But today, everyone is surrounded only by information optimized for themselves, and the common topics of conversation are disappearing. That is precisely why the shared experience of compulsory education—having learned the same things in the same era—is more important than ever. It is the foundation of national unity and identity, as well as the basis for the capacity to empathize with others from different cultures.

It is only natural that compulsory education is boring. This is because it is not a place to provide immediate amusement, but rather a place to spend time building the foundational intellectual stamina—which, much like Suguri’s "Future-Origin Theory," grows increasingly effective as you age through your twenties, thirties, and forties.

That is why the question we should ask is not "What do you remember?" but rather, "What kind of thinking patterns remain within you after you have forgotten everything?"—that, truly, is the real meaning of the ten years of compulsory education.

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