Nov 8, 2013 4 min read

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad as compiled by the Associated Press:

Name some of the world’s major problems: Poverty, disease, starvation, war. All of them are likely to be made worse by man-made climate change.

That sober scenario is painted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. It plans to issue a report next March on how global warming already affects how we live and what is likely to happen in the future.

The report details risks on each continent and suggests ways that countries can adapt. In North America, for instance, the highest long-term risks are wildfires, heat waves and flooding.

It’s not just gloom and doom, the report’s director said, because it suggests what countries can do to avert some of the damage.

“I see the difference between a world in which we don’t do anything and a world in which we try hard to get our arms around the problem.”

The university entrance examination system across East Asia might once have been needed to allocate scarce university slots. But even with expanded college enrollment, and more slots, the competition to get into higher-ranked universities is destroying the lives of young people and their families in countries like South Korea and Japan.

On Thursday, 600,000 South Korean high school seniors took the brutal university entrance exam, which many have been preparing for since primary school. The results will shape the rest of their lives, their jobs and even their marriages. The stress is such that the suicide rate among young people up to age 24 rose to 9.4 per 100,000 in 2010, a nearly 50 percent increase from 2000.

In South Korea, where more than 70 percent of high school graduates enter university, education is a national obsession that the government worries is actually damaging society. Education accounted for nearly 12 percent of consumer spending last year. Excessive spending on education in South Korea accounts in significant part for the 45 percent poverty rate among the elderly, who cannot save for retirement because they have spent so much of their money on educating their children.

The paradox is these ridiculous tests don’t necessarily lead to demanding college classes. In Japan, where almost all college students graduate, it’s quite common for students to be asked only to parrot back lecture notes. Rigorous thinking, reading and writing too often is simply not expected. Doing away with rigid entrance exams is just the first step. What needs to be debated is the quality of education once the students are admitted.

National Stadium, the main stadium for the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, will be demolished next year and a new stadium with a seating capacity of 80,000 will be built for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, which Tokyo will host.

Just inside of what is known as Marathon Gate at the current stadium stands a stone monument that testifies to one of the tragedies of World War II seven decades ago. Inscriptions on the monument dedicate it to “roughly 100,000 students who left the pen for the sword and were sent off to the battlefields.”

National Stadium was built in 1958 on the former site of Meiji Jingu Gaien Stadium, where a ceremony was held Oct. 21, 1943, to send off university and higher vocational school students to the war. The moratorium on the conscription of college students was lifted for those at least 20 years old to make up for the worsening shortage of troops as Japan’s war prospects increasingly deteriorated.

The Japan Sports Council said it plans to preserve the monument as part of the new stadium. Given the Olympic goal of “promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity,” the monument belongs inside the new stadium – the main venue for the 2020 games – so people have the opportunity to reflect on the loss of so many students in the war.