In 2019, the theme of the Cross Summer Academy was “Open Minds Change the World.”
Together, we accomplished one very important goal: we demonstrated that no matter where we are from, when we come together to celebrate life, we all grow. We accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible. We demonstrated that, in human terms, our world is borderless.
Throughout the Academy we celebrated the openness of discovery: the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing, the creative potential in technology art and design, the passion of Wasabi cultivation, the exploration of Karst geography, and much more.
In 2020 our theme shifts slightly to recognize one of the worlds most symbolic gestures of community: the Olympics. Our theme, as a consequence, is “Olympic Minds Change the World.” We recognize this by recognizing the Olympic potential in all of us, in sport, engineering, art, exploration, and more.
In 2019 the Cross Summer Academy welcomed people from all parts of the world: Morocco, France, Georgia, the USA, Sri Lanka, Canada, the Philippines, Russia, Taiwan, England, Germany, Ireland, Japan, China, and Korea.
The 2020 Cross Summer Academy is going to be an even more diverse experience. Together, we look forward to defining the kind of world we choose to live in.
Put your child in a total English and International environment.
Are you considering sending your child overseas to learn English? Are you thinking about International School Education? Are you just returning to Japan and hope to maintain your children’s English and International exposure? If you respond “Yes!” To any one of these, then the Cross Summer Academy is for you!
Put your child in a total English and International environment. Let them work in English, to accomplish exciting learning objectives with kids and teens from around the world. Help them gain the confidence to become part of the international community!
If life is ultimately dependent on the choices we make, then Education should focus on the skills we require and understandings we need in order to make them wisely. In his poem, “The Road not Taken,” Robert Frost offers suggestions, and I have questions…
Dear Mr. Frost, I know all about your choice of the road less travelled, the grassier one. The one that wanted wear. But I wonder. In our lives, while we tend look ahead at impending decisions, we seldom arrive at those junctures with comfort or certainty or the emotional security of knowing or understanding the consequences of the choices we must make. To do so would require a modicum of prescience.
When the road splits, we choose one. What I dearly want to understand is not just the merit of a road less travelled, but how to even recognize the fact that it is! Whether I move in one or the other direction, how can I not be left ultimately with a “What if?” and with that, unrequited experience.
You see, those forks in the road, past, present, and future, have all at some point been in the future. To understand which are travelled less than others, to know which make more sense than the alternatives, to determine which are better, is, at any pending juncture, intimidating. Though the actions best taken may well be suggested by the paths that lead to forks, the implications and inexorable consequences of the choices to be made remain, for the most part, unknowable. Consequentially, the propositions are daunting.
I know! Some say, “Of course, everything suggests you turn right.” Others arrive at the completely opposite conclusion. Ultimately, Interpretation is the nearest thing we have to prescience. The interpretations that ultimately guide us to one path over another present us with perhaps the most unsettling of human experiences. Risk, the fear of loss, the unknown.
Carpe Diem! they say. We are told to celebrate risk. Challenge ourselves. Carve our own paths through life. Go where no (hu)man has gone before. These are all noble. Admirable. And yet, every decision we make leads us in a direction rife with unknowables. Each time we decide, new consequences emerge, not only for ourselves, but also for those who have been parts of our journeys to each point of divergence.
And then there are those things that are born of events and relationships during our travels along the paths we’ve already chosen. As a simple consequence of being, haven’t they also their own rights to exist. What of them? If each decision we make marks the demise of things that may have otherwise been, then each decision we make also becomes an act of sacrifice.
So how should we proceed? How do we move ahead? They say life is full of compromise. Every choice we make leads us in one direction over all possible others, the sum total of which become entire lifetimes unrealized. Roads less travelled? I would venture a parallel characterization: lifetimes lost.
The choices we make carry with them the weight and responsibility of sacrifices made and possibilities abandoned. As a consequence, each choice, every road, every sacrifice comes with it a promise and a responsibility to ensure it was the right one. “Life is like pain dipped in honey.” This is a line from another poem I did not fully grasp in my youth. Now, Mr. Frost, framed by the roads I have taken and sacrifices I have made, I think I do.
What if?
Indeed.
The most comfort in conclusion I can reach is one, driven by compromise, and perhaps, importantly, the respect owed to the sacrifices I have myself made: maybe those sacrifices are, in reflection, our best guides, to help us learn, to teach us how to make the best of the choices we do make. We owe them our dedication, effort, open minds, passion, love, and inspiration.
Perhaps, with that, our paths will lead us to new achievements and greater satisfaction. We may also discover ways to resume, in our journeys through life, paths we considered lost forever.
If life is ultimately dependent on the choices we make, then Education should focus on the skills we require and understandings we need in order to make them wisely. In his poem, “The Road not Taken,” Robert Frost offers suggestions, and I have questions…
Dear Mr. Frost, I know all about your choice of the road less travelled, the grassier one. The one that wanted wear. But I wonder. In our lives, while we tend look ahead at impending decisions, we seldom arrive at those junctures with comfort or certainty or the emotional security of knowing or understanding the consequences of the choices we must make. To do so would require a modicum of prescience.
When the road splits, we choose one. What I dearly want to understand is not just the merit of a road less travelled, but how to even recognize the fact that it is! Whether I move in one or the other direction, how can I not be left ultimately with a “What if?” and with that, unrequited experience.
You see, those forks in the road, past, present, and future, have all at some point been in the future. To understand which are travelled less than others, to know which make more sense than the alternatives, to determine which are better, is, at any pending juncture, intimidating. Though the actions best taken may well be suggested by the paths that lead to forks, the implications and inexorable consequences of the choices to be made remain, for the most part, unknowable. Consequentially, the propositions are daunting.
I know! Some say, “Of course, everything suggests you turn right.” Others arrive at the completely opposite conclusion. Ultimately, Interpretation is the nearest thing we have to prescience. The interpretations that ultimately guide us to one path over another present us with perhaps the most unsettling of human experiences. Risk, the fear of loss, the unknown.
Carpe Diem! they say. We are told to celebrate risk. Challenge ourselves. Carve our own paths through life. Go where no (hu)man has gone before. These are all noble. Admirable. And yet, every decision we make leads us in a direction rife with unknowables. Each time we decide, new consequences emerge, not only for ourselves, but also for those who have been parts of our journeys to each point of divergence.
And then there are those things that are born of events and relationships during our travels along the paths we’ve already chosen. As a simple consequence of being, haven’t they also their own rights to exist. What of them? If each decision we make marks the demise of things that may have otherwise been, then each decision we make also becomes an act of sacrifice.
So how should we proceed? How do we move ahead? They say life is full of compromise. Every choice we make leads us in one direction over all possible others, the sum total of which become entire lifetimes unrealized. Roads less travelled? I would venture a parallel characterization: lifetimes lost.
The choices we make carry with them the weight and responsibility of sacrifices made and possibilities abandoned. As a consequence, each choice, every road, every sacrifice comes with it a promise and a responsibility to ensure it was the right one. “Life is like pain dipped in honey.” This is a line from another poem I did not fully grasp in my youth. Now, Mr. Frost, framed by the roads I have taken and sacrifices I have made, I think I do.
What if?
Indeed.
The most comfort in conclusion I can reach is one, driven by compromise, and perhaps, importantly, the respect owed to the sacrifices I have myself made: maybe those sacrifices are, in reflection, our best guides, to help us learn, to teach us how to make the best of the choices we do make. We owe them our dedication, effort, open minds, passion, love, and inspiration.
Perhaps, with that, our paths will lead us to new achievements and greater satisfaction. We may also discover ways to resume, in our journeys through life, paths we considered lost forever.
For one special week, from August 12th
to August 16th, Cross Education will move the base of its Summer
Academy operation to the OKUTAMA＋Old
Furusato Junior High School facility at 594 Kawai
town site. There, for one entire week, the Summer Academy will engage in the Cross-Okutama International Obon Outdoor
Camp experience. In an effort to bring sustainable international education
opportunities to the residents of Okutama. Cross Education intends to grow this
program annually, inviting more participants each year from Japan and countries
from around the world. This year the Academy is hosting kids from Japan,
Russia, Canada, the US, Finland, Australia, Morocco, France, Georgia, Taiwan,
and beyond, and we look forward to sharing the experience with the kids and
teens of the Okutama region. Cross programs tie in local, regional, and
globally relevant applied learning opportunities that highlight culture,
society, arts, technology, environment, and internationalism. We look forward
to those using the things that are important to the people of the Okutama
region in order to help kids and teens to learn more about each other, and the
wider world around them. We believe this, in partnership with the community
residents, businesses, schools, and municipal authorities, can grow into a
local highlight and a strong example of regional internationalism.
Cross Education was established in 2018 to build international education in Japan in a new and exciting way, and to bring an exciting new learning opportunities to Japan for bot local and inbound international students. The President of Cross Education, Greg Culos, spent the majority of his career in Canada bringing students to Canada to participate in globally relevant education opportunities. When he returned to Japan in 2012, he discovered that international education in Japan was almost entirely dedicated to international families who already lived in Japan. He discovered, to his amazement, that Japan had almost no culture of inbound youth student mobility for programs of international relevance.
So, the mission of Cross Education is to be the vehicle to accomplish that goal.
The directors of Cross education, through their efforts to reach out to international student sources from around the world, have discovered there is a massive amount of interest in this regard. Students from all corners of the planet see Japan as an exciting destination for international studies, and a unique option from the traditional centers around the world. And Cross has set out to do what few to none have made efforts to accomplish: to create the systems required for students to access not only programs of relevance, but also the services they require to come to Japan as students. In its first year, Cross Education has established means for students to select programs of interest, provide accommodations and services, and begin growing, internationally, a culture of inbound students coming to this country to participate in applied learning opportunities, in English, in the arts, sciences, technology, engineering, fine arts, outdoors, language, culture and more. What is an entirely unique approach to international programs in other parts of the world, Cross programs are equally relevant to inbound international students, resident international students, and local Japanese students.
Cross programs are a where the youth of the world can truly meet to learn things that are relevant anywhere.
Cross has the full and collaborative support and partnership of Showa Women’s University, the municipal government of Mine City in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the UNESCO Chair on Global Education, and Okutama+ Community Building and Tech Incubation Center in the Okutama region of Tokyo. Cross Education is not only proceeding along its path towards its goal, but also achieving one further of its objectives: to open the regional centers of Japan to participate in the growth of its brand of international education opportunities. In this way, Cross Education is in fact pursuing the goal of helping revitalize regional Japan with an exciting proposition to both local inhabitants and the international community as a whole.
The Cross Education International Summer Academy, in particular, based mostly from the Showa Women’s University campus, has dedicated two of its seven Academy weeks to two regional locations.
The 1st Annual Akiyoshidai Youth Summit
From August 26th to 30th, the entire Academy will be relocated to Mine City in Yamaguchi Prefecture where they will include the local community in their activities, and execute what will be the 1st Annual Akiyoshidai Youth Summit. This is intended to be the first year of an event that will grow across the upcoming years, becoming a signature locus of International education for the region that hopefully will act as a catalyst for further international education industry growth in the region. This project, where youth from around the world will gather to work together on globally relevant issues, is fully supported by the City of Mine, Yamaguchi Prefecture, and the UNESCO Chair on Global Education.
Obon Week Okutama Outdoor Camp
In the same spirit of regional revitalization and the determination to grow inbound youth international education opportunities, Cross Education, with the collaborative support of Okutama+ Community Building and Tech Incubation Center, Cross Education will transport its the entire Academy population to the community of Okutama, in the foothills of the Japanese Alps, to experience a week of international education and learning inspired by all of the social cultural assets that the region offers. The goal is, as in Akiyoshidai, to open up new opportunities for people from around the world, and locally within the communities of the surrounding region. Among the activities planned for this week is an International Summer Festival where the local community can participate with the international participants in a festival celebrating both local and international cultures.
For more information, call us, or contact us at basecamp@cross.education.
