Kazuya Maejima - Retiring in AY2025

I was in charge of elementary and intermediate French grammar and reading in the Faculty of Economics, as well as the large-lecture course "Introduction to Linguistics" and the small-group "Independent Study Seminar: History of Grammar." In the first-year French classes, contrary to the cliché attributed to the Sumerians that "young people these days...," I found that today's youth have not lost their interest in foreign languages and other subjects at all. In the cross-faculty lectures and seminars, I was constantly stimulated by unexpected questions from enthusiastic students. Since the year I began working at the Juku, personal computers spread rapidly, the internet became a necessity, and in recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has come to be utilized in educational settings, greatly transforming our lives. For someone like me who has researched the history of grammar and spent my days with ancient documents from the first half of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century, the current situation—where books that once required wandering through domestic and international libraries or second-hand bookstores can now be easily downloaded—is nothing short of astonishing.

There is a saying attributed to the theoretical physicist Pierre Duhem (1861-1916): « Les faits d’aujourd’hui sont construits avec les théories d’hier. » This can be translated as "Today's facts are constructed from yesterday's theories," which could also be reinterpreted as "what is considered an empty theory today will eventually become a fact," or further, "humans, who travel back and forth between imagination and reality, will never reach the fact itself." This may sound familiar, but if there is no end to academic research, perhaps it is because no entity exists apart from objectification.

University education, including foreign languages, will likely face significant transformation due to continued technological innovation. However, I believe that human intelligence, which has opened up new perspectives by comparing disparate elements, will never be surpassed by technology.