The Japanese education system, while widely praised in western countries, is subject to heavy criticism within Japan. Education Reform in Japan analyses this criticism, and explains why proposed reforms have failed. The author shows how the Japanese policy-making process can become paralysed when there is disagreement, and argues that this `immobilism' can affect other areas of Japanese policy-making.

The Japanese education system has attracted increasing attention over the past 20 years, largely due to the belief that it has been central to Japan's economic growth. Many have felt, however that the system is stunted by an inability, or perhaps even on an incapacity, to change. This study challenges these contentions. It examines the reform policies implemented by Prime Minister Nakasone during the 1980s and argues that, not only has the system changed considerably as a result of Nakasone's work, but that it continues to do so. It analyses the key areas of the education reform debate, in particular internationalism, government control of education, increased liberalization and various social problems, and considers the degree to which response to them have been successful. This book will be of great interest to all those interested in the Japanese educational system.

This title demonstrates from a sociological point of view and by way of empirical analysis that educational reforms have caused profound changes in the society of post-war Japan. It focuses on the spread of inequality in Japanese society as an 'unintended outcome' to which the educational reforms ended up contributing.

Explores the implications of a national US curriculum through the study of Japanese education. It suggests that the US educational system lacks certain organizational mechanisms that support student achievement and would facilitate teacher involvement in the educational reform process.

Scholars of modern Japan agree that education played a crucial role in that country's rapid modernization during the Meiji period (1868-1912). With few exceptions, however, Western approaches to the subject treat education as an instrument of change controlled by the Meiji political and intellectual elite. Principle, Praxis, and the Politics of Educational Reform in Meiji Japan offers a corrective to this view. By introducing primary source materials (including teaching manuals, educational periodicals, and primary school textbooks) missing from most English-language works, Mark Lincicome examines an early case of resistance to government control that developed within the community of professional educators. He focuses on what began, in 1872, as an attempt by the newly established Ministry of Education to train a corps of professional teachers that could "civilize and enlighten" the masses in compulsory primary schools. Through the Tokyo Normal School and other new teacher training schools sponsored by the government, the ministry began what it thought was a straightforward "technology transfer" of the latest teaching methods and materials from the United States and Europe. Little did the ministry realize that it was planting the seeds of broader reform that would challenge not only its underlying doctrine of education, but its very authority over education. The reform movement centered around efforts to explicate and disseminate the doctrine of kaihatsushugi (developmental education). Hailed as a modern, scientific approach to child education, it rejected rote memorization and passive learning, elements of the so-called method of "pouring in" (chunyu) knowledge practiced during the preceding Tokugawa period, and sought instead to cultivate the unique, innate abilities of each child. Orthodox ideas of "education," "knowledge," and the process by which children learn were challenged. The position and responsibilities of the teacher were enhanced, consequently providing educators with a claim to professional authority and autonomy - at a time when the Meiji state was attempting to control every facet of the Japanese school system. Principle, Praxis, and the Politics of Educational Reform in Meiji Japan analyzes a key element to understanding Meiji development and modern Japan as a whole.

Education policymaking is traditionally seen as a domestic political process. The job of deciding where students will be educated, what they will be taught, who will teach them, and how it will be paid for clearly rests with some mix of district, state, and national policymakers. This book seeks to show how global trends have produced similar changes to very different educational systems in the United States and Japan. Despite different historical development, social norms, and institutional structures, the U.S. and Japanese education systems have been restructured over the past dozen years, not just incrementally but in ways that have transformed traditional power arrangements. Based on 124 interviews, this book examines two restructuring episodes in U.S. education and two restructuring episodes in Japanese education. The four episodes reveal a similar politics of structural education reform that is driven by symbolic action and bureaucratic turf wars, which has ultimately hindered educational improvement in both countries.

In many societies today, educational aims or goals are commonly characterized in terms of “equality,” “equal opportunity,” “equal access” or “equal rights,” the underlying assumption being that “equality” in some form is an intelligible and sensible educational ideal. Yet, there are different views and lively debates about what sort of equality should be pursued; in particular, the issue of equality of educational opportunity has served as justification for much of the postwar restructuring of educational systems around the world. The author explores different interpretations of the concept of equality of educational opportunity in Japan, especially as applied to post-World War II educational policies. By focusing on the positions taken by key actors such as the major political parties, central administrative bodies, teachers’ unions, and scholars, he describes how their concepts have developed over time and in what way they relate to the making of educational policy, especially in light of Japan’s falling birthrate and aging society.

This book assesses the impact of globalization on the education systems of key East Asian countries, including China, Hong Kong, Japan, and the "tiger economies" of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, examining how the increasingly interdependent economic system has driven policy change and education reform. It discusses how policy makers have responded to changes required in educational outcomes in order to equip their societies for new global conditions and explores the impact of new approaches and ideologies related to globalization, such as marketization, privatization, governance changes, managerialism, economic rationalism and neo-liberalism, making comparisons across the region. Based upon in-depth research, fieldwork, literature analysis, policy document analysis and personal reflections of academics serving in the education sector, this volume recounts heated debates about the pros and cons of education restructuring in East Asia. The discussions on national responses and coping strategies in this volume offer highly relevant insights on how globalization has resulted in restructuring and draws lessons from comparative public policy analysis and comparative education studies.

This book is a case study of policy translation at an elite Japanese university. Through an analysis of the implementation of government-funded reform policies, Black investigates the role of the university in society, the youth-to-work transition, and systems of organisational management operative at the university. Black was present throughout the initial adoption phase of the Super Global project, a policy project implemented at an elite Japanese university, the University of Tsukuba. Aligned with a basic critical realist perspective, the different components of his research are integrated in four levels of analysis: the macro level of policy, the organisation level of the university, the departmental level of the English Section, and the individual level of the student. The analysis and the different sources of data look at internal structures of the organisation and try to understand what the mechanisms of policy translation operative are in the integrated and overlapping complexity of the four levels of analysis. At the core of the research is the objective of understanding why things are as they are. The main theories to emerge from the case study serve to inform the judgements and decisions of practitioners or policy makers in this area. It is a telling case for internationalisation-focused education reform policy in Japan.