CORE SKILLS ／ Skills You Gain
More than “knowledge.”
Skills for life.
Skills that hold up anywhere, even as the world keeps changing — that is what NGA sets out to grow. Built around five “ships,” they overlap with the very abilities the World Economic Forum calls the most essential for the years ahead.
We grow “flow,”
not “stock.”
To borrow from Isao Hosoya’s Flow and Stock: what schools do well is “stock” — storing knowledge accurately. That served us well when society changed slowly. But in fast-changing times, we need “flow” — ability that, like water, changes shape to fit whatever vessel the era provides and keeps moving forward. It stays useful even after everything around us has shifted. NGA grows that flow, head-on.
From “transmitting knowledge”
to “skills for life.”
It isn’t that one is right and the other wrong — they play different roles.
In an age of change, we believe the column on the right is what gives a child their foundation.
is what builds the next era.
To me, those children are this world’s treasures.— Tatsuro Hoshino, Founder & Principal, NGA
Skills to live,
in any era.
Every skill NGA grows ends in “-ship.” Not abilities to line up on a single scale, but ones that grow within a child and travel for a lifetime — each one nurtured by living a single real question.
Toward skills that
don’t wear down.
This isn’t NGA’s claim alone. Across education, economics and labor, study after study points the same way.
AI will soon do.
Calculation, memorization, producing the right answer — much of what a test score measures will be handled by AI. So what is left only to people? Gathering diverse companions to create value that does not yet exist. Deciding, for yourself, how to live. A test score can barely measure these — so most schools rarely grow them.
- Produce set answers, quickly and accurately
- Among same-age, same-place, similar peers
- Advance skilfully along a path already laid
- With people of many ages and places, make new value
- Decide your own path, for yourself
- Gather and move people — leadership
Neither is above the other. But as the era changes, so does what becomes valuable. What NGA grows is this — the unmeasurable.
— Because I grew up differently, I could picture the next era. Because I engaged with diverse people and chose my own path, this school came to be.
(Founder & Principal, Tatsuro Hoshino)
The place these five skills grow
is “the Curriculum.”
Four layers of learning, and a timetable you design yourself. See how the five ships become everyday learning.
