By Dennis D. McDonald

On December 5 an English language news article appeared in the Mainichi Shinbun’s The Mainichi web site titled Tokyo education board to launch learning platform on metaverse for truant children. The experimental program is designed to respond to the rising number of truant and non-participating children of school age in Japan. Starting experimentally with 30 children this month, if succesful the program will be extended to other Japanese school districts next year. This is how the news report describes the program:

The project is aimed at creating a forum for children to be part of, and helping them learn through classes using web conferencing systems.

Specifically, the virtual learning platform will come in three forms: a floor for students who refuse to attend school or find it difficult to do so for other reasons; a floor for students who recently arrived in Japan and cannot understand the Japanese language well; and a common floor for all types of students.

With the program, children will interact with each other using their avatars that can freely move around across the metaverse, and will be able to seek advice from teachers and support staff who will also have their own avatars. Children can not only chat with their mentors but also talk to them face to face online.

If you think about it, school attendance has traditionally involved children not only in classroom learning but in all the social and cultural experiences — good and bad — that accompany traditional building-centered educational programs. The pandemic and the home schooling movements in the US have forced a rethinking of that traditional focus, and we all probably have some knowledge of how students have fared during the pandemic as schools and teachers learned how to manage remote learning.

The “metaverse” approach being tried out in Tokyo — enabling students to use avatars to engage with teachers and other students while navigating virtual environments — is an intriguing idea. I can imagine that an avatar-based approach might work for those students who feel estranged from normal reality but who feel comfortable with engaging online.

Keep in mind that the Tokyo experiment is focused on “truant” and “estranged” children. I would want to know a lot more about the positive and negative aspects of such a program before recommending it more broadly. For example, while we know kids these days are comfortabe interacting online, moving too rapildy to a metavers based learning environment, where interaction takes place via virtual personalities or avatars, might have unanticipated impacts on personality formation and self image.

The question of what implications such an approach to schooling would have on home schooling is an interesting one. Here in the US the practice of home schooling is closely tied to parenteral control over what is taught and how many parents opt out of standard public or religious private schools for cultural or political reasons. The Tokyo experiment appears to be managed by the school system and in no way resembles what we think of traditionally as parent controlled home schooling.

On the other hand, parents interested in home schooling their kids might band together regardless of geographic location to support development of a virtual metaverse based learning environment that reflects their own religious, cultural, or political values. This might appeal to those wary of public schooling.

I have to believe that the resources required to carry this off successfully would be substantial. But if charter schools have been successful in securing grants and public funding, why shouldn’t virtual metaverse-based schools?

Copyright (c) 2022 by Dennis D. McDonald