The History of Modern Japanese Education is the first account in English of the construction of a national school system in Japan, as outlined in the 1872 document, the Gakusei. Divided into three parts tracing decades of change, the book begins by exploring the feudal background for the Gakusei during the Tokugawa era which produced the initial leaders of modern Japan. Next, Benjamin Duke traces the Ministry of Education's investigations of the 1870s to determine the best western model for Japan, including the decision to adopt American teaching methods. He then goes on to cover the eventual "reverse course" sparked by the Imperial Household protest that the western model overshadowed cherished Japanese traditions. Ultimately, the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education integrated Confucian teachings of loyalty and filial piety with Imperial ideology, laying the moral basis for a western-style academic curriculum in the nation's schools.

This handbook offers a global perspective on the historical development of educational institutions, systems of schooling, educational ideas, and educational experiences. Its 36 chapters consider the field's changing scholarship, while examining particular national and regional themes and offering a comparative perspective. Each also provides suggestions for further research and analysis.

As one of the most rapid and earliest nations to achieve "Western modernisation", much of Japan’s success stems from its fruitful literacy history during the Tokugawa shogunate as well as later influences from Western educational ideals and consequent economic and democratic conflicts in Japan. This book seeks to enlighten readers on how education and schooling contributed to Japan’s particular process of modernisation and industrialisation. These historical insights can be applied to crises in formal and systemised education today, and form the basis of potential solutions to controversies faced by formal education in Japan and other nation-states. A book that bridges the international information gap in Japan’s history of education will be immensely valuable to historians of both international and Japanese education.

This book highlights recent education research on Japan based on sociological and other related approaches to historical developments and accomplishments. Written primarily by members of the Japan Society of Educational Sociology, it brings to light concerns and viewpoints that have grown out of the Japanese educational context. By focusing on uniquely Japanese educational research phenomena, the book offers international readers new insights and contributes to the international debate on education. It may help sociologists and social scientists outside Japan gain a deeper understanding of ongoing changes in education in Japan as well as its historical and structural contexts.

This book records the history of Japan’s international cooperation in education from the 1950s to 2020. It provides a crucial overview of the nearly 70 years since Japan began engaging in international cooperation in education in order to record and document these efforts that range from basic to higher education to technical and vocational education and training, and the large numbers of people involved in their respective areas of activity and specialization. The book provides useful indicators for exploring new forms of education cooperation in this age of global governance and beyond. The authors include not only researchers but also field practitioners, such as personnel from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and NGOs. Chapters 1, 3, 5, 9, 12 and 15 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This is the first biography in English of an uncommon American, Dr. David Murray, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers College, who was appointed by the Japanese government as Superintendent of Education in the Empire of Japan in 1873. The founding of the Gakusei—the first public school system launched in Japan—marks the beginning of modern education in Japan, accommodating all children of elementary school age. Murray’s unwavering commitment to its success renders him an educational pioneer in Japan in the modern world. Benjamin Duke has compiled this comprehensive biography of David Murray to showcase Murray’s work, both in assisting around 100 samurai students in their studies at Rutgers, and in his unprecedented role in early Japanese-American relations. This fascinating story uncovers a little-known link between Rutgers University and Japan, and it is the only book to conclude that Rutgers made a greater contribution to the development of modern education in the early Meiji Era than any other non-Japanese college or university in the world.

Sparked by the confluence of accelerating domestic transformation and increasingly explicit impacts from ‘globalization’, the Japanese education system has undergone tremendous changes during the turbulence of the past decade. This volume, which brings together some of the foremost scholars in the field of Japanese education, analyzes these recent changes in ways that help us ‘reimagine’ Japan and Japanese educational change at this critical juncture. Rather than simply updating well-worn Western images of Japan and its educational system, the aim of the book is a much deeper critical rethinking of the outmoded paradigms and perspectives that have rendered the massive shifts that have taken place in Japan largely invisible to or forgotten by the outside world. This ‘reimagining’ thus restores Japan to its place as a key comparative link in the global conversation on education and lays out new pathways for comparative research and reflection. Ranging widely across domains of policy and practice, and with a balance of Japanese and foreign scholars, the volume is also indicative of new directions in educational scholarship worldwide: approaches that center global interactions on domestic education and contribute to a far greater recognition of the polycentric, polycontextual World unfolding today. This book will be of keen interest to scholars of education worldwide, as well as those working in and across anthropology, sociology, policy studies, political science, and area studies given that contemporary transformations in Japan at once reflect and approximate political, social, and educational shifts occurring throughout the World in the early decades of the 21st century.

Captures the essence of life in great civilizations of the past. Each volume in this series examines a single civilization, and covers everything from landmark events and monumental achievements to geography and everyday life.

Drawing on the case of moral education reform, this book provides an authoritative picture of how policy is enacted between state policymaking and school practice in Japan, focusing on how national policy is enacted locally in the classroom. The study follows the 2015 moral education reform from its genesis in central government, through the Ministry of Education to its enactment by local government and schools. The book looks beyond written policies, curricula and textbooks to examine how teachers, school administrators and others make sense of, and translate, policy into practice in the Japanese classroom context. Chapters explore how moral education practice has changed in response to the intentions of national policy, and analyzes the implications for understanding processes of policy enactment in the Japanese education system. This book presents a new perspective on the complexity of education policy making, practice, and the gaps in between. It will be of interest to postgraduate students, researchers, and academics in the fields of education policy and politics, moral education, school administration, and international and comparative education more broadly, particularly in Asia.

Emphasizing the political discourse and conflict that have surrounded Japanese education, this book focuses on the three main issues of central versus local control, elitism versus equality, and nationalism versus universalism.