体育教師からハーバード大学へ -- -- 。日本の教育現場の矛盾を肌で感じた松田悠介さんは、「理想の学校をつくりたい」という思いを胸に渡米を決意。
苦手意識のあった英語を地道に磨きながら挑んだハーバード大学への留学が、彼の人生を大きく変えた。
現在は教育NPOや海外進学支援を通じて、日本の若者たちに新しい学びのかたちを届けている。
There are many roads to attaining English expertise. Yusuke Matsuda got there via a career as a physical education teacher. "I've always been active," says Matsuda. "In my phys ed teacher days, I teamed up with the English teacher and exhorted my students to play sports in English. I wanted to bring more freedom into English learning and make it feel less like a chore."
Teaching and education are Matsuda's greatest endeavors, though he knows how difficult school life can be. "As a kid, I was bullied and my life was pretty miserable," recalls Matsuda. "But in junior high, my phys ed teacher took me under his wing. He taught me to be strong and enabled me to build my self-confidence. He changed my life forever."
Matsuda's mentor is likely to be extra proud of his former pupil now. Matsuda holds degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Stanford Graduate School of Business. He's also the founder of two nonprofit educational organizations, Teach for Japan and Learning For All.
Currently, Matsuda leads Crimson Education Japan, an organization that supports Japanese students seeking study at universities abroad. His deep and abiding interest in education brought him to this place. "One of our goals is to provide quality international education, and to offer a more diverse and customized learning experience. I believe this will help nurture a person into being innovative, productive and able to hold their own on the global stage."
During his days as a phys ed teacher, Matsuda realized that "the more effort I poured into my work, the more I began to notice the cracks and contradictions in Japan's education system. I wanted to found my own school and to this end, I had to learn about leadership and school management." Matsuda was disappointed by the programs on offer in Japan, so he looked overseas. "I wanted to get to the very top, which happened to be Harvard University."
The climb was far from easy. "My English abilities were at around the Eiken Grade Pre-2 level when I started. I studied like mad and took the TOEFL exam 14 times before I got my score up to 104." Matsuda listened to CNN in English during his morning commute and committed tons of vocabulary to memory. "On Fridays, I went to an Irish pub in Shinjuku and forced myself to speak to three non-Japanese people. I went for lunch with the ALT (assistant language teacher) at my school to up my conversational skills. I began a study blog to hold myself accountable. Studying English is like muscle building. In that vein, I've been in training for the last 20 years."
Still, Matsuda couldn't believe it when he was accepted by Harvard. "I knew my GRE scores -- the standardized exams used for U.S. graduate admissions -- were dismal. Later, I was told they were probably the worst in Harvard's history. But I was accepted on the strength of my essay, which I was told was full of passion about what I wanted to achieve. I'm very glad I went to Harvard. I discovered that the people making significant social impact through social startups are likely to have studied abroad. It's not so much the academic degree that counts as much as attaining connections on a global scale and gaining an objective vision of Japan that enables people to realize Japan's weaknesses as well as its potential. You can meet such high fliers when you study abroad."