Sukkoto,
You have a lot of pent-up feelings, and you also have a hard time staying on track. This thread is about NOVA, but let's keep a little to the side of teaching in Japan just to maintain some semblance, ok?

You don't want to get a degree. That's your prerogative. How you perceive it is also yours. "Privilege"? Well, yeah, don't you think if someone goes the extra mile to get some sort of training/education/related experience, they deserve a privilege over someone who didn't? It doesn't matter why the other person didn't -- be it poverty or choice. You do more, you get more in return. Save the social commentary for another forum, please.

Opening doors ("privilege") also happens by networking -- a very common way that qualified and sometimes unqualified people here get university jobs and high school jobs. It's not what you know, it may be who you know sometimes. No degree needed sometimes there, and it's LIFE, no matter where you go.

It's for anyone who can afford it, or who wants to enslave themselves with years or worse of indentured servitude called debt.
You didn't even read or take to heart what I wrote, did you? There are scholarships and grants out there, which you don't have to pay back, hence no servitude or debt. Get off the soapbox. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. By the way, are you one of those in the poverty group that you said you really meant, or are you just whining for the masses?

you left out comments about what knowledge base is deemed
valuable.
Didn't have to mention them because as has already been mentioned, any degree will get you a work visa here as a teacher. No real "knowledge base" is really required. So, if you want to come to Japan and work, you either have the experience or a degree in poly sci, anthropology, microbiology, quantum physics, or underwater basketweaving. It's all the same to places like NOVA.

(Granted, NOVA and GEOS will give you some sort of general knowledge test at the interview, but that's to begin the weeding out process for the truly uninformed.)

I hear there are a lot of "Asians" doing construction jobs in Japan.
I hope this was meant tongue in cheek, because you otherwise show a total lack of knowledge about the work force in Japan. Nuff said.

Someone asked me why I did not want a degree, so I responded.
That is why I have written such stuff in this string.
Schools are a major institution in which a society recreates itself.
That includes privileges that also existed.
Including class
Again, this is non sequitur for the thread. Besides, the elite classes of people you espouse don't always exist. Do you call someone with a BA in Art History a member of the elite? Or with a degree in paleontology? Or forensic medicine? Or culinary science?

Whenever I criticize school in general, people
always get on my case about this.
They think I am against learning.
Learning, one does not need to attend an institution for this.
Learn all you want. It still won't get you a work visa unless you have the degree or the experience to go along with it. Pretty straightforward. You can criticize all you want, but that is the simple fact. Now, you are just trying to do what so many frustrated degreeless people do in these forums -- find a loophole or other means to get a job here. There aren't that many.

Your view of the world may indeed be "bleak", but that won't get you very far, whether towards a work visa, a teaching job in Japan, or anywhere else in life. People usually don't like complainers.