From the historical viewpoint, is it possible that curriculum and teacher education could have been integrated at the beginning of the era of curriculum studies? This paper focuses on the development of type study in the 1910s by C. A. McMurry (1857-1929) as a pioneering curriculum theory surveying the scope of teacher education. McMurry was a key…

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)…

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 aim of this paper is to consider the trends and problems of Japanese educational science from the viewpoint of Tokugawa educational thought. Firstly, I reexamine the past main works of the studies on Tokugawa educational thought, and conduct a survey of the trends of these studies. Second, through critical analysis of these studies I try to…

Numerous historical studies have been done regarding education in modern Japan from a great diversity of viewpoints. It is true that studies of educational systems and history of educational policies have made considerable progress. Still, there remains great room for improvement in terms of both quantity and quality for studies of everyday…

Every state in the United States, under the NCLB act, has set state standards and is testing all students in grades 3-8. Students are given printed questions to which they write answers with a pencil on an answer sheet. These written tests are usually given to determine the academic achievements of students. This paper traces the early history of…

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…

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…