Today, the National Center Exam was given throuout Japan. In the afternoon, a question asking about the origin of Moomin became a hot topic on the internet.

So, I checked the question.

What I thought after seeing the question was that this is more than the origin of Moomin.

The following is the question:

The question is not just asking the country of its origin. Students also have to choose the country from languages written in the pictures.

Since I lived in Finland, I can tell at first look that "Paljonko se maksaa?" means "How much does it cost?". But the languages of Nordic regions are not familier to many people. So, it must have been a quite annoying question. The example shows a Swedish tale and its language. So maybe, students had to guess the answer from the fact that Swedish and Norwegian have the same roots in Germanic languages

with similar spellings, while Finnish is a completely different language from other nordic countries.

But even students knew the language, if they didn't know the origins of those stories first of all, the only way to answer this question was to guess though....

Well, I was a kind of at a loss to think how much knowledge our children have to have to prepare for those exams in the futute.

My son loves history and researches lots of things by himself and visits castles and warplaces to imagine how samurai and people lived and fought through.

I wish in the future there would be schools which acknowledge each individual's special ability and what each child achieves not only by just a test result.

Today's quote

Because I have a dream, a life is brilliant.

Mozart

Good night.