English Translation follows Japanese

見えない力に回される教室

ガタガタと音を立てて回る無骨な回転台。その上に立つ高校生の私に、先生が「それっ」と勢いよく回転する自転車のタイヤを渡してきた。水平に持っていたタイヤ軸を、グッと垂直に傾けてみる。その瞬間、信じられないことが起きた。

「わっ、何これ！？」

まるで透明な巨人に肩を掴まれたかのように、私の体と回転台が、勝手に「右」へとクルクル回り始めた。驚いてタイヤを元に戻すと回転は止まり、逆方向に傾けると、体も「左」へと回り出す。

「角運動量保存の法則、そしてジャイロ効果だ」先生はニヤリと笑った。

40年以上前、私が留学していたアメリカの高校での物理の授業である。

彼の授業はいつも奇抜なアイデアに満ち、教科書をなぞる時間は一秒もなかった。この実験も、公式の丸暗記ではなく、私たちの五感に「なぜ？」を突き刺すためのものだった。

“体感と感動”。そこから教室には「どうして傾けるだけで回るの？」と質問が溢れかえった。誰もが自分で考え、夢中で発言する、圧倒的な活気がそこにはあった。

凍りつく英語会議の静寂

それから長い年月を経て、外資系企業で働くようになった私は、まったく対極の「静寂」に直面することになる。舞台はグローバル会議。画面の向こうの本国メンバーが、早口の英語で新しい戦略をプレゼンし、終盤に差し掛かる。

"Any questions?" （何か質問は？）

その問いかけが響いた瞬間、日本側の会議室はしんと静まり返る。重苦しい沈黙の中、焦り出すのは日本側の上司たちだ。「なぜ質問が出ないんだ？」と心の中で苛立ち、気まずい思いを募らせていく。

誰かがポツリとどうでもいい質問を絞り出すと、日本側は「質問が出た」という事実だけでホッとするが、本質的な議論には発展しない。結局、いつも話すのは英語が堪能な一部のメンバーだけ。英語に自信のない他のメンバーは下を向いたまま、嵐が過ぎ去るのを待っている。そこには、あの物理の教室にあったような活気は微塵もない。

「学ぶ教育」と「考える教育」の溝

なぜ、これほどまでに違うのだろうか。

根底にあるのは、教育のアプローチの違いがある。日本の教育は、体系化された知識を効率よくインプットする「学ぶこと（暗記・習得）」を中心に据えてきた。正解のレールから外れることを恐れる文化だ。だから、完璧な英語で、完璧な正解の質問を組み立てようとするあまり、言葉が詰まってしまう。

一方で、あの物理の先生の教育は「自分で考える力」を中心に据えていた。知識は覚えるものではなく、驚きから導き出すもの。日本でいう「でんじろう先生」のような実験精神が、生徒の「知りたい」という本能を刺激していた。あの先生(他にも美術と音楽を担当していた)にとってはすべて「クリエイティビティ」という一つの軸でつながっていたのだ。

英語会議に「タイヤ」を投げ込むには

では、あの冷え切った英語会議をどうすれば変えられるのか。

必要なのは、英語の流暢さではない。上司たちがただ「質問しろ」と急かすのをやめ、メンバーの思考を刺激する「問いのタイヤ」を代わりに投げ渡してあげることだ。それも、手元で思わず動かしたくなるような、具体的で生々しい問いがいい。

 「この戦略、明日からやるとして、一番めんどくさそうな部分はどこ？」

 「もし、あえて一つだけ大反対するなら、どこを突っ込む？」

 「今の話、10点満点中何点？ 数字だけチャットに打ってみて」

きれいな英語で高尚な正解を答える必要はない。不格好でもいいから、渡された問いを「自分ごと」として傾けてみる。すると、「そこなら言いたいことがある」「今のやりかたじゃダメですか？」と、現場のリアルな疑問が溢れ出し、自然と会話が回り始める。

受動的に「聞く」だけの場から、強制的に「巻き込まれる」場へ。あの日の物理の教室のように、一本のタイヤが、凍りついた会議を動かす原動力になるはずだ。

English Translation by AI

A Classroom Driven by an Invisible Force

A rugged, clunking turntable spun loudly. As I stood on it, a high schooler filled with tension, my teacher forcefully thrust a spinning bicycle wheel into my hands. "Here you go!" I held the wheel axle horizontally at first, and then gave it a sharp tilt into a vertical position. In that exact fraction of a second, something unbelievable happened.

"Whoa, what is this?!"

Without anyone pushing my back or my feet kicking the floor, my body and the turntable began to spin around to the right all on their own, as if a transparent giant had grabbed me by the shoulders. Startled, I returned the wheel to its horizontal position, and the spinning snapped to a halt. When I tilted it the opposite way, my body began to spin to the left.

"The law of conservation of angular momentum and the gyroscope effect," the teacher said with a grin.

This was a physics class from over forty years ago, at an American high school where I was studying abroad. 

His classes were always bursting with eccentric ideas, and there was never a single second spent just tracing the pages of a textbook. This experiment wasn’t designed to force us to memorize formulas; it was meant to stab a sharp "Why?" directly into our five senses.

It was pure "experience and emotion." Driven by that spark, the classroom flooded with a barrage of questions: "Why does it spin just by tilting it?" A vibrant, overwhelming energy filled the room, where everyone was thinking for themselves and eager to speak up.

The Frozen Silence of English Meetings

Many years later, having built a career at a multinational corporation, I found myself frequently confronting a "silence" that was the polar opposite of that classroom. 

The stage is a global meeting. Of course, conducted in English. On the other side of the screen, headquarters members present a new strategy in rapid-fire English, and the meeting nears its end.

"Any questions?"

The moment those words echo, the Japanese side of the conference room falls dead silent. Amidst the heavy, suffocating stillness, it is the Japanese managers who begin to panic. Irritated internally, wondering why no one is asking anything, their sense of awkward embarrassment intensifies.

When someone finally squeezes out a trivial, half-hearted question, the Japanese side breathes a collective sigh of relief based solely on the fact that “a”question was asked. Yet, it never evolves into a discussion that reaches the true purpose of the meeting. In the end, the only ones speaking are the few members already fluent in English. The other members, lacking confidence in their language skills, keep their heads down, waiting for the storm to pass. There is not a single shred of the liveliness found in that physics classroom.

The Chasm Between "Learning Education" and "Thinking Education"

Why is there such a stark difference?

At the root lies a fundamental divide in educational approaches. Japanese education has long centered around "learning as acquisition" --efficiently inputting structured knowledge and memorizing it. It is a culture that fears stepping off the track of the "correct answer." Consequently, by trying too hard to construct a flawless question in perfect English, people end up paralyzed and speechless.

Conversely, that physics teacher’s approach centered entirely on "the power to think for oneself." Knowledge was not something to memorize, but something to derive from a sense of wonder. His experimental spirit --reminiscent of Japan's science entertainer, Denjiro-- stimulated the students' primal instinct to know. For this teacher, who also taught art and music, everything was interconnected under a single axis: creativity.

How to Toss the "Wheel" into an English Meeting

How, then, can we transform these frozen English meetings?

What is required is not English fluency. It is for managers to stop rushing their teams with demands to "just ask something," and instead throw them a "question-wheel" that sparks their thinking. Not a grand, high-level philosophical debate, but a concrete, visceral question that they can’t help but want to grab and manipulate.

"If we were to execute this strategy starting tomorrow, what would be the single most annoying part for your team?"

"If you had to pick just one thing to absolutely oppose in this plan, where would you poke a hole in it?"

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you feel about what we just heard? Just drop a number in the chat." 

There is no need to answer with an elegant, sophisticated "right answer." It doesn't matter if it's clumsy. The moment they take the specific question handed to them and tilt it through the lens of their own ownership, real, raw doubts from the frontlines will start pouring out: "Well, if it's about that part, I actually have something to say," or "Why can't we keep doing it the current way?" From there, the conversation naturally begins to spin.

Shifting the space from passively "listening" to actively "being pulled in." Just like in that physics classroom all those years ago, a single wheel can become the driving force that gets a frozen meeting moving.

June 2026