Michael Sandel Class Program at NHK

NHK Educational Channel (TV) has been showing very interesting program since this March.

The program is called as “Justice”, which is the one of the popular classes taught at the Sanders Theatrea, which is a historical buiiding on the campus at Harvard University, and it is also popular for much wider audiences via the Internet.

The class “Justice” is taught by Professor Michael Sandel of Harvard University and the field is categorized as “public philosophy” or political philosophy, which is centered at the utilitarianism, with the principle of utility, for aiming at producing the greatest amount of happiness and preventing the greatest amount of unhappiness.

Professor Sandel style is to ask the students to choose one answer or response among a couple of prospective answers or responses for the specific question or situation, and the reason why they have chosen their answers or responses by providing their supporting facts or ideas to other students or to Professor Sandel, so that Professor Sandel gives the students his opinion from either a different angle or an agreeable angle depending on the further response from the students to his added questions.

This program can be seen via the Internet, without watching the NHK TV program, but I will follow the TV program until it will end to broadcast on June. I will strongly recommend this program for the prospective students who are planning to study at any of the universities or colleges in the United States of America, so he/she could get some extent of a classroom atmosphere taught there, although this program is taught at Harvard University.

It should also be noted that the debating skill is a very important in the advanced classes, such as the classes for the honor students, at public universities or private universities, or private liberal art colleges, having much small size of classes, each requiring the debating skill in class room for the discussions.