The Education of Doubt and Other Essays

Everyone in Meiji Japan agreed that children should be taught to believe. The zoologist Oka Asajirō argued that they should be taught to doubt. In “The Education of Doubt” (1912) he points to the primary schools of a nation that had just won two wars and become, in its own eyes, a first-class power, and asks what those schools have forgotten to teach.

The ten essays in this book bring a naturalist's clear eye to education: what teaching is when animals do it, why parents and teachers cling to superstition, what science lessons are for, how a nation that wants to be modern should think, and what people misunderstand about biology. He writes with irony, plain examples and sudden turns. In the closing essays he turns to hygiene, natural selection and the “improvement of the stock,” eugenics, arguments presented here as historical documents, faithfully and without endorsement.

Ten complete essays in a new translation from the Japanese, with a translator's note, endnotes and source information. Oka's science is that of his time and is kept as he wrote it.