The Unlearn Initiative was founded in June 2020 by a team of alumni from international schools in the Kanto Plains area. 

For us, school was a sheltered experience of upper middle class multiculturalism and endless possibility. While we were taught that we had to respect people from different parts of the world, our schools never specified what we owed to peers who were disabled, facing racism, or exploring their sexuality. We noticed we treated people differently or got treated differently on the basis of things like race and gender, but we didn’t know what to do about it. The cultural and educational indifference to the rampant discrimination within the Japanese international school community normalized its existence to us, while our academics and extracurriculars prepared us to see the world as a place where we could have anything we wanted if we worked hard. Each of us graduated with the powerful advantage of a private school education in our back pocket and jet off to a different part of the world to pursue our passion like we had been prepared to do. What we all realized after seeing a little bit more of the world was that our privilege was paramount in our access to all the things we wanted, and most people who worked just as hard as us would never get half as far simply because of their race, gender, ability, or class.

It clicked that the world was unjust and unkind to people who hold certain identities, and the right thing to do was to commit to the lifelong process of dismantling systems that oppress people for simply being who they are. But were we too late to this realization? When should we have started this process? We reflected individually and as a group on the privilege and oppression that is visible in the international school community, and one thing became clear: we weren’t taught any of this in school. The fight against racism, classism, transphobia, and all other forms of oppression shouldn’t start when you’re an adult — it needs to start in a classroom, within the community you grew up in. 

Our team thought about what we wished we had learned in school to prepare us to fight for social justice, identifying four core teaching areas of anti-discrimination and social justice education: mental health, sex education, postcolonialism and whiteness and intersectionality. We sent out an anonymous survey asking students and alumni to rate the schools they went to from 1 to 10 in their teaching of the four areas.