I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation
You’re living in the past, it’s a new generation
A girl can do what she wants to do
And that’s what I’m gonna do
- Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, “Bad Reputation”

Today, I was planning to write about Railgun one more time.  But an unexpected conversation on the train took my thoughts in a different direction, and now I’m itching to get these new words out.  So here we go.

For starters, let’s look at the Japanese term “bancho.”  You might remember this word from one of the running gags on Minami-ke, in which rumor spread that Minami Haruka was the bancho of her middle school.  The subtitles I watched at the time had left “bancho” completely untranslated, but it was easy enough to figure out from context that it meant a bad girl, a gang leader of some kind.

Bancho A - Minami Haruka

What I didn’t know, though, and what I’ve picked up on just recently, is that the bancho is kind of a time-honored institution.  In every school, it’s pretty much expected for one bad egg to rise up from the student body and become the de facto leader of the other delinquent kids.  To teachers, delinquency and the bancho are unavoidable evils.  But having observed the education system for a while now, I’m not so sure I agree.

I can’t recall any anime I’ve seen where classtime was more than just window dressing for some other story.  And with good reason—school in Japan is pretty dull.  No matter what teachers want for their kids, the path to college and high employment is designed so that students MUST focus on memorizing facts and regurgitating them for exams.  It’s easy to point fingers at Japan for creating a culture of worker bees, but the truth is that compulsory education is like this pretty much everywhere.  The school system puts people through the grinder to build obedient, trained citizens for an industrial society.

Bancho B - Uotani Arisa

The problem is that this is no longer what we need.  Technology and ideas are moving at such a fast pace that now it’s more important to raise creative, quick-thinking young adults, rather than forcing them to consume information that will be obsolete when they graduate.  Unfortunately, we’ve gotten so used to the panopticon controlling twelve years of our lives that we’re not changing quickly enough.

Enter the bancho.  It may surprise you to know that the kids who talk to me the most aren’t the good students, but some of my worst.  They sleep through class, never do their homework, and they use a pidgin of badly pronounced English words to communicate foul concepts.  But the point is, they talk to me, and the skills they practice actually make them more prepared to communicate than the ones who ace tests.  In fact, delinquents are fearless, cunning, quick on their feet and able to solve problems efficiently. A bancho has all of these, plus the personal charisma to lead the rest.

Isn’t that what we want?  And isn’t the fact that these kids don’t want to be in class a clear sign that we’re doing something wrong?

Bancho C - Onizuka Eikichi

Of course, I have lessons to run, and sometimes I’d like nothing more than to give these punks a good old-fashioned thrashing.  But that doesn’t change the fact that I see a glimmer of potential in them.