This is a television series that sends kids out to run errands and perform tasks, do take a look if you have a minute or two:
Hajimete no Otsukai (My First Errand) - Spring (2011) (Part 2)
The kid is two.
It's almost terrifying to watch.
There are dozens of the vids, here a five-year-old takes his little sister shopping.
Kids riding the train to school at six and seven.
Here's more culture stuff from Savvy Tokyo: "How Japan Prepares Its Children for Independence"
And here's the headline story, from Quillette:
In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as ‘white supremacy’. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked – from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.Of course the Japanese aren't having sex, or if they are it seems high-end anthropomorphic robots are popular, so there won't be as many of the 2-year-old fearless little buggers walking around in 100 years but for now it's an interesting sociology contrast.
Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators. Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus ‘safe’ from threatening ideas.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, persuasively unpacks the causes of the current predicament on campus – which they link to wider parenting, cultural and political trends. Haidt is a social psychology professor at New York University and founder of Heterodox Academy. Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In 2015, they wrote The Atlantic cover story of the same name.
Haidt and Lukianoff’s explanation for our era of campus craziness is primarily psychological. In sum, a well-intentioned safety culture which has led to ‘paranoid parenting,’ and screen time replacing unstructured and unsupervised play time, has created a fragile generation. Haidt and Lukianoff focus on people born after 1995, iGen or Generation Z, who began attending college in the last five years – just when things started to escalate.
This cohort is experiencing a dramatic rise in anxiety, depression and suicide. When they arrived on campus, in an increasingly polarised political climate, they were unprepared to be intellectually challenged. They – or at least the ‘social justice’ activists of this generation – responded by creating a culture of censorship, intimidation and violence, and witch hunts against non-believers. Universities, led by risk adverse bureaucracies, are treating students like customers and allowing an aggressive, censorious minority set the agenda....MORE
