Personal Narrative

This is a really small, trivial episode when I was 2nd year junior-high student, that greatly changed my philosophy. I'm still wondering if it was good or not, but at least, I'm really happy to have changed previous myself.

I was such a insolent, childish kid before that. I was basically good at studying and taught my friends English and mathematics which many weren't good at, so I was a "good boy" in a way and I had many friends. However, I was really spoiled and self-centered, probably because I'm the youngest in my family. I don't remember any win-win quarrels because of my selfishness. I wonder how I could live in a dormitory from junior-high life, since it required a lot of collaboration.

The big trigger of ending my selfishness happened in one week. We had a special class called "life-guidance class" every week and we did variable things such as cleaning restrooms, our own rooms, having discussion of our class, etc. On that week, we were given one assignment, that is, "to do something that would make someone happy by next week." For the assignment, what I did was to line up the slippers in the bathroom in the dorm neatly. That was everything I did, but I kept that everyday throughout the whole week. I sometimes did that in order of Japanese syllabary.

Next week, we shared what we've done. I completely remember the situation although I'm bad at memory and don't remember almost everything of my junior-high life. I said what I did, and then all the teacher and classmates in the room were surprised and showed some respect to me. I could say "I knew the good feeling of being respected", but rather I want to say "I found the happiness to make someone happy."

I think this was the first time of making someone happy spontaneously. Even after that, though really trivial, I kept doing these things such as lining up slippers as well as before, picking up garbages, and so forth.

I was changed from self-centered to allocentric, and often think of what others would feel. I started to wonder what is the best way to live with other people, because I also have some skeptical view of living life with everything allocentric. I started to think of what is the best motive to do a certain thing. I started to seek what is the ideal ethical education for children. I started to be stumped about what I really want. All of these changes wouldn't have happened if I didn't have the experience. Above all, this event was the introduction for me to philosophical way of thinking.


I still wonder when I can say a particular action is allocentric, and how I can educate children to be so, and if it is good to be allocentric in the first place. When allocentric one does something, it is often good and he/she receives some rewards. Then it's difficult to say what his/her purpose was. Educating children allocentric is close to educating them to do good things, and the latter is dangerous because it can easily turn to educating them to do things in order to make a good situation for themselves, which is self-centered way of thinking. But I think of these things based on the belief "doing something that is good to others is good," which was given to me on the week.           I really thank the event and the teacher who programmed it for ending my small and selfish view and opened new approach to education and my way of life-living.