In the 21st century, when the universalization of higher education demands diversified students to be more involved in study and rather than in learning, the ideal of scholarship is expected to transform toward both teaching orientation and study orientation, with a focus on the teaching and study process in the classrooms with a result of being a…

Japanese compulsory education had been praised because of its equality around the early 80s. However, since the third wave-educational reform that began in the 1980s and still persists, it has been pointed out that there are disparities between schools in terms of students' socioeconomic background and academic performance. Although there…

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…

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)…

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…

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…

Higher education systems are now in a global state of flux. Japan is no exception. The most persuasive framework for analyzing the basic structure and direction of change is the structural-historical theory of the American sociologist Martin Trow. This is a generalization of his "elite to mass to universal" based on first American and then…

This study seeks to explore whether unregulated school choice has the potential to diversify the high school curriculum, as elitist conservatives and neoliberals in Korean argue. Making use of qualitative research methods, this paper examines how national curriculum policies are implemented at two selected high schools (high-achievement 1,…

Traditionally school teachers have been considered as lacking knowledge of their own. They were regarded as consumers of knowledge created by university researchers outside their practice. With the increasing call for teachers to assume a role as researcher in recent China, more and more research has been conducted into the knowledge of school…

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…

Current Educational Reform in Japan is oddly captured with confused conceptions of "compulsory education." The Ministry of Education blankets such connotations of it, as a national budget system, mandated school curriculum, responsible partnership of school with community and accountabilities of local school board, in defense of vested national…

I take up recent remarks by Teruhisa Horio about school student disaffection in Japan and see echoes of this in Britain. In that country the traditional school curriculum of discrete largely academic subjects is often taken to be one cause of the problem. I review justifications for it but no sound ones appear to be available. We need to…

The question explored here is this: Is curriculum for the 21st century best organized around the traditional disciplines, or is there a more promising alternative? The answered offered is that our best option is to stretch the disciplines from within, push back the boundaries now separating them, and ask how each of the expanded subjects can be…

This paper examines an alternative view of teacher education that enables teachers to redefine their image and mission in the changing society of Japan. This vision is inspired by and draws upon the educational and philosophical thoughts of nineteenth-century American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and contemporary…