The conditions required for a reform of the educational finance system as the foundation of compulsory education are 1) devolution to schools and introduction of national standards in order to deal with "individual equality" while compensating for the insufficiency of "aspectual equality," and 2) dealing with educational needs…

Learning for disaster reconstruction carried out by teachers and children in schools faces the fundamental contradiction of how tragic memories leaving deep scars can be told and shared, and the attempts to deal with this problem. In this paper, in order to approach the issue of whether an educational practice which overcomes this contradiction is…

The content of school education has always been at the center of modern school reforms. At the end of Edo period and during the early Meiji period, Fukui domain (han) and later Fukui prefecture took the initiative in modernizing their school system. The program of "futsu no gaku" ("general education" for the samurai class in Fukui domain)…

Seikatsu-Tsuzurikata is an educational method related to teaching of written expression for children that was pioneered in elementary school education settings throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and which was widely adopted in Japan in the 1930s. It is a unique method developed in Japan that uses both school and non-school resources, not only in…

Over the past five and a half years starting in 2006, forty practitioners at a research group Kakutokugata Kyoiku Kenkyukai have worked toward reform in educational methodology. The purposes of their research have been to enable students to gain embodied learning experience, and to deepen and enrich their learning by introducing dramatic…

This paper considers the contemporary prominence of the concept of social justice and identifies two influential strands of thought that currently affect thinking about education: John Rawls' notion of justice as fairness and a more emancipatory conception typified by critical pedagogy. With this prominence the term has gathered a rhetorical force…

It goes without saying that character development occurs in school. However, it is necessary to make that very premise an object of analysis regarding the issue of school articulation. This article will reveal the establishment of character development through schools by focusing on the formation of elementary education as well as the expansion of…

The rapid development of higher education in the postwar period has given rise to various problems, and higher education studies in Japan have developed in response to them. What have been the major issues, and how did academic research respond to them, in postwar Japan? This article delineates an outline of higher education studies in general,…

In all European countries, education has been related to nation building. It has contributed to the building of national identity, national consciousness and the development of a nation state. Since the Second World War and above all since the fall of the Berlin Wall, education in the European Union has also included a consideration of European…

Social education is seen as one important way of building a learning society, through supporting people in solving their daily problems. In a learning society, people could participate in a big project to develop their community as well as enjoying learning, without being excluded because of economic status, gender, age or ethnicity. Implementing…

The recent "Nationwide academic achievement and study situation survey" was clearly influenced by the idea of "authentic assessment", an educational assessment perspective focused on "quality" and "engagement". However, when "performance assessment", the assessment method corresponding to this focus, is adopted in academic achievement surveys, it…

The symposium entitled "Social Changes in East Asia and Educational reforms: China, Korea, and Singapore" suggested that these countries are carrying out rather drastic educational reforms in the context of rapid social changes. The knowledge gained from the symposium also has important suggestions for Japanese educational reform. In addition, as…

The political landscape in school finance has undergone significant changes in the United States in recent years. It was only a generation ago that the state government assumed the primary funding responsibility in public schools, public agencies at the state and local level "monopolized" service delivery, and many reform initiatives did not…

Since the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japan's educational studies first began by receiving theories of practical education from the UK and U. S. Later, together with the political trends around 1890, there began a trend towards receipt of German educational studies. Along with the spread of elementary education, there were experiments with building…

This paper examines the development of educational theory in Japan from 1945 to the present in five time divisions: (1) postwar "new education" and its critics (1945-52); (2) revisionist educational policy versus the people's education movement (1952-61); (3) the formation of "postwar pedagogy" as a self-reflection of the educational system…