Educational Progressivism, Cultural Encounters and Reform in Japan

Yoko Yamasaki, Hiroyuki Kuno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317354376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educational Progressivism, Cultural Encounters and Reform in Japan provides a critical analysis of educational initiatives, progressive ideas and developments in curriculum and pedagogy in Japan, from 1900 to the present day. Drawing on evidence of both cultural encounters and internal drivers for progressivism and reform, this book re-evaluates the history of Japanese education to help inform ongoing and future debates about education policy and practice worldwide.

With contributions from Japanese scholars specialising in the history and philosophy of education and curriculum studies, chapters consider key collaborative improvements to teacher education, as well as group learning, 'life education', the creative arts and writing, and education for girls and women. The book examines Western influences, including John Dewey, Carleton Washburne and A. S. Neill, as well as Japan's own progressive exports, such as holistic Zenjin education, Children's Villages and Lesson Study, highlighting cultural encounters and progressive initiatives at both transnational and national levels. The chapters reflect on historical and political background, motivations, influences and the impact of Japanese progressive education. They also stimulate, through argument and critical discussion, a continuing discourse concerning principles, policy, politics and practices of education in an increasingly globalised society.

A rigorous and critical study of the history of progressive education in Japan, this book will interest an international readership of academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of progressive education, comparative education, social and cultural history, history of education, Japanese studies, curriculum studies, and the history of childhood.

Chapter 1

Origins and outline of progressive education in Japan

Yoko Yamasaki

Introduction

Modern educational theory and practice in Japan began in the 1860s, with the Japanese learning western ideas and introducing them into elementary school practice. Complementing this period of enlightenment during the Meiji era, the government supported various translations in order to disseminate knowledge of western philosophies and western civilisation. Japan had been previously unfamiliar with key works of scientific, social and political critique. Despite ongoing tensions concerning the character of the developing education system, by the beginning of the twentieth century books by Samuel Smiles, Scottish author of Self-Help, which became known as the ‘bible of Victorian liberalism’, by Scottish publishers and promoters of evolutionary thought William and Robert Chambers, and by educational thinkers including the Swiss-French Rousseau, German Herbart, and American Dewey, had all been translated. Such translations were key vehicles for introducing western philosophy and educational thought. In 1889 the Constitution of the Empire of Japan (Meiji Constitution) was promulgated, with a mixed form of constitutional and absolute monarchy. This compromise between traditional and modern values was reflected the following year in publication of an Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyoiku Chokugo) (1890), clarifying the relationship between education and the Japanese National Polity (Kokutai) as based on a historic bond between benevolent rulers and loyal subjects. This Rescript defined the fundamental purpose of education as cultivation of virtues, especially loyalty and filial piety, which continued as the source of school curricula up until the end of the Second World War (Horio, 1988: 71). Meanwhile, modernisation of the education system continued apace.

The political backdrop to progressive education can be briefly explained (for further detail consult Appendix C; see also Tsujimoto and Yamasaki, 2017). Following 350 years of feudal government, the Edo or Tokugawa period during which the country had been almost completely closed to the western world, a new regime was established in 1868 under the Meiji emperors. In Meiji Japan, education became a means of integrating the diverse and multi-layered social ranks, regional identities and cultural mores of Edo-period feudal society, and forming a newly centralised, unified system of values. The urgent objective of the Meiji government was to catch up rapidly with Western countries, having been pressured by Western powers to open its ports and having entered the international capitalistic system as a latecomer.

From 1912 the Taisho regime introduced a notion of democracy, expanding the educational system with elementary schools and middle schools, and training of teachers in so-called ‘normal schools’. From 1926 there followed the Showa era, with a succession of social and economic problems, material and cultural damage in the Second World War and a period of post-war Allied Occupation (1948–52). Thereafter a period of rapid economic growth produced one of the highest levels of GNP in the world, but accompanied by educational problems in schools and classrooms. From 1989, with the accession of Emperor Akihito, the Heisei period commenced, marked by a political turn to neo-liberalism with associated economic policies but economic disaster with a radical reduction in growth.

Related to these political and cultural contexts, this chapter focuses on significant and influential thinkers, educators and societies, seeking the roots of progressive theory together with the practice of civilisation and enlightenment in Japan, in order to explain the origins and development of Japanese progressive education, and to lay the ground for approaching the contents of each chapter that follows.

Progressive education and international networks

In the modernisation of Japan, education was a central issue. A useful English language source is the text of a series of lectures on ‘Japanese Education’ at London University in 1909, by Baron Kikuchi, former Minister of Education and President of the Imperial University of Tokyo (Kikuchi, 1909). The School System Ordinance (Gakusei) was the first systematic regulation of schooling in 1872. The government established a normal school for training elementary teachers in Tokyo in autumn 1872, to which were recruited fifty young men from the warrior class. Here, the American elementary education system, its curriculum and pedagogy, was taught by ‘foreign advisers’ (oyatoi gaikokujin) who were professionals and employed by the Japanese government. These advisers, and also Japanese students sent overseas to study, played a leading role in Japanese modernisation. A Higher Normal School for secondary teachers was established in Tokyo in 1875, and trainees for both elementary and secondary school were taught educational theory under instruction from foreign advisers, using key texts translated by the Ministry of Education. 1875 also saw the first normal school for women established in Tokyo.

Regarding school provision and school population, in 1873 (the year following the Education Code) there were in total 12,558 elementary schools (of which there were twice as many public as private schools). These catered for 1.1 million pupils (a school attendance of 28 per cent of the school age population) of which rather less than a quarter were girls. By 1879, marking the first decade of the Meiji era, the number of schools had more than doubled to 28,025 (of which 95 per cent were public); school attendance had risen markedly to 41 per cent, 58 per cent of eligible boys against 23 per cent of eligible girls (girls were therefore less than half as well represented, though the trend of female participation was rising more quickly). Over the same years middle schools increased from 20 in number (3 public and 17 private, catering for 1747 boys and 20 girls) to 89 schools, all public, 66 for men, 15 for women and 8 for both sexes. (Kikuchi, 1909: 75–6)

As regards teachers, Kikuchi’s basic statistics show that normal schools for teacher training were also on the increase in the early Meiji years, from 53 in 1874 to 89 in 1879. Student numbers in the normal schools rose to just fewer than 7,000 (nearly 6,000 men and only 784 women) and of the 693 normal school teachers, 644 were male and 49 female. The purpose was to train elementary school teachers, and 37 of the normal schools had elementary schools attached (2 examples of such schools are the subject of Chapters 2 and 3). In 1875 a course for the training of teachers in middle schools was initiated in the Government Normal School in Tokyo (Kikuchi, 1909: 76).

A shift of gender balance in the teaching force over the Meiji, Taisho and Showa periods is significant, the proportion of female teachers in schools increasing from about 30 to 40 per cent. By comparison with contemporary statistics for feminisation of the teaching profession in the ten years 2001-2011 the proportion of women teachers remained steady at about 60 per cent in elementary schools, rose marginally from 40 to 42 per cent in junior secondary, and more markedly from 26 to 30 per cent in senior secondary; this appears to be a relatively low proportion of women compared with World Bank figures in 2013 for primary schools: France 83, Germany 86, UK and USA both 87; in England the figures for all schools calculated by the government in 2013 were 74 per cent of teachers in all schools, and 80 per cent including teaching assistants and auxiliary staff.

The Meiji government established a cabinet system and Arinori Mori was appointed the first minister of education in 1885, promulgating an ‘Imperial University Ordinance’, ‘Elementary School Ordinance’, and ‘Normal School Ordinance’ in rapid succession during March and April 1886, to build a national education system. Normal Schools and Higher Normal Schools aimed to train students to cultivate three virtues of ‘obedience, sympathy and dignity’, and Mori strengthened the military style within teacher training by insisting that students live in dormitories. All tuition in Normal Schools was paid for by the state, textbooks were loaned and some living expenses supplied, though teachers were then obliged to work for five years after graduation, including two obligatory years in schools designated by government. Education and career prospects for women from the lower samurai (or ‘warrior’) class, equivalent to ‘lower middle class’ in the west, were improving in imitation of foreign models, notably teachers and missionary women. Textbooks had to be approved by the Minister. Mori energetically inspected schools in various parts of the country and made public speeches to urge people’s awareness as ‘imperial subjects’ (shinmin), to rouse their commitment and effort to improve Japan’s status in the international community. Although Mori had only a short period of office as Minister before he was assassinated in 1889, he played a significant role in strengthening centralised control of education (Morikawa, 1989: 38–65).

Regarding the pre-history of progressive education, in the modernisation of Japan there were mainly three western educational theories that were influential: first, that of the ‘object lesson’ from J.H. Pestalozzi in Switzerland, through translation by Hideo Takamine who was dispatched by the Japanese government in 1861 to investigate teacher training at Oswego Normal School in USA; secondly, ideas developed by British philosopher Herbert Spencer in his influential book Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical (1860) introduced by Mori who had been Japanese ambassador to Britain at that time; and thirdly, the Herbartian pedagogical method of five formal steps widely known internationally through J.F. Herbart’s disciple in Germany, Wilhelm Rein. Herbart’s methodology was introduced to Japan by Emil Hausknecht, a foreign adviser and teacher from Germany, who taught at Tokyo Imperial University from 1887 to 1900 and counted Tomeri Tanimoto amongst his students. Herbartian theory was especially attractive in the context of Japanese nationalism from 1887, and the Imperial Rescript on Education was signed by Emperor Meiji in 1890 to articulate government policy on the guiding principles of education for the Empire of Japan. Tanimoto published many books on pedagogy, adapting teaching methods, especially in his Practical education and method of education (Jitsuyo kyoikugaku oyobi kyojuho) in 1894. Here he focused on the method of teaching reading and writing, a core Japanese subject, based on Herbart’s five formal steps: preparation, presentation, association, generalisation, application. His explanation of pedagogy was welcomed by practitioners, who looked for a systematic theory for their lessons with large classes of children under the new national education system, related both to ideologies of constitutional and imperial government and to the theory of democracy (Takiuchi, 2014: 9). That tendency was labelled a ‘Herbartian whirlwind’, but Tanimoto subsequently converted to ideas of the New Education, a departure from Herbart, after returning from study abroad in France, Germany, Italy and England, 1899-1902 (ibid.: 235–63). There he visited many schools including two progressive models: Edmond Demolins’ École des Roches in France and Cecil Reddie’s Abbotsholme in England.

The term ‘New Education’ in Japan was not originally dependent on the West. It was applied in Tanimoto’s epoch-making book in 1906 entitled New Education Lectures (Shin kyoiku kogi) which contained the texts of fifteen lectures he addressed to teachers in Kyoto schools during 1905 to 1906. Somewhat at variance with his advocacy of Herbart, his exposition of New Education was as ‘a self-learning and self-mastering method’ (Jigaku hodoho) aligned with national policies of Japan, which adapted nationalist theory from L’Éducation Nouvelle (1898) by French sociologist and pedagogue J.E. Demolins. Demolins admired Abbotsholme School in England, recently founded by Cecil Reddie, with its fostering of creative powers, strong wills and independent attitudes; another work of Demolins, A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons (1897) was translated into Japanese as A great people with independent and self-sufficient attitude (Dokuritsu jiei dai kokumin) in 1902. From its very beginning the term ‘New Education’ was therefore complicated in its multiple implications.

Additionally New Education appeared in a translation of John Dewey’s The School and Society (1899) in 1901. Its first translated version was re-translated and published by the Ministry of Education in 1905. In the same period Kishie Tezuka and Kuniyoshi Obara developed a version of New Education related to the neo-Idealism of writers such as R. Eucken and P.G. Natorp in Germany (Minkankyoikushiryo kenkyukai, 1975: 74–5).

The roles of Inazo Nitobe and Kanjiro Higuchi

In the years considered above, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, progressive educational thought from the West was received and absorbed in Japan. Two highly influential scholars in this transfer process were Inazo Nitobe and Kanjiro Higuchi, who both worked as leading and supportive figures engaging with the international world.

Nitobe attended Sapporo Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University) under the strong academic and spiritual legacy left by Dr William S. Clark, American professor of chemistry, botany and zoology who had been employed as a foreign adviser in establishing the College. Later Nitobe progressed to Tokyo Imperial University. Disappointed by the academic level there, in 1884 he embarked on study abroad at private expense, going to the USA for three years, and studied economics and political science at Johns Hopkins University, where he became a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers). He aspired to forming a personal ‘Bridge to Japan across the Pacific’. Returning home he undertook consecutive jobs as a Meiji bureaucrat and an educator, principal of Sapporo Agricultural College, a member of the review board of the Fifth World's Fair in Paris 1900, and full professor of law at Kyoto Imperial University and at Tokyo Imperial University. He taught agricultural economics and colonial studies, and was also appointed founding president of Tokyo Woman's Christian University in 1918.

Nitobe was also highly esteemed, delivering lectures on Japan and writing a classic exposition in English, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899). When John Dewey and his second wife visited in 1919, Nitobe offered generous hospitality for a month in his Tokyo home. He became an Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations in 1920 and moved to Geneva, where he was also a founding director of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (later UNESCO) in its effort at reconstruction for international peace. Bushido is a key text in examining cultural encounter, particularly with respect to evaluating transnational influences:

A close observer of oriental institutions and peoples has written:

“We are told every day how Europe has influenced Japan, and forget that the change in those islands was entirely self-generated, that Europeans did not teach Japan, but that Japan of herself chose to learn from Europe methods of organisation, civil and military, which have so far proved successful. She imported European mechanical science, as the Turks years before imported European artillery. That is not exactly influence,” continues Mr. Townsend, “unless, indeed, England is influenced by purchasing tea in China. Where is the European apostle,” asks our author, “or philosopher or statesman or agitator, who has re-made Japan?”

(Nitobe, 1905: 174–5)

The ‘close observer’ was Meredith Townsend, distinguished political author of Asia and Europe (1901), who effectively exposes the subjectivities involved in attributing influence. Moreover, a further dimension for consideration in the history of progressive education is the significant transnational flow from Japan to the West in that Bushido was highly influential on Baden-Powell’s philosophy in founding the Boy Scout movement (eventually worldwide, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Series editors
• Preface by Peter Cunningham
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Abbreviations
• Key to historical eras
• Introduction: progressivism, New Education, and cultural encounters
• 1 Origins and outline of progressive education in Japan
• 2 Integrated learning: Takeji Kinoshita and Nara-jo Fusho
• 3 Heiji Oikawa: group-based dynamic teaching and curriculum reconstruction
• 4 Free Drawing and art education: Kanae Yamamoto and Bunka Gakuin
• 5 Nurturing truly free individuals through self-governing life: Motoko Hani’s Jiyu Gakuen
• 6 Kuniyoshi Obara’s Zenjin education at Tamagawa Gakuen
• 7 Daily Life Writing in school: creating alternative textbooks and culture
• 8 Satoru Umene: curriculum reform and the world history of education
• 9 Hama Omura’s Unit learning practice for Japanese classes
• 10 Kinokuni Children’s Village School: theory and practice from Dewey to Neill and Aitkenhead
• 11 Japanese progressivism and continuing cultural encounters
• Appendix A: Map for progressive education in Japan
• Appendix B: School systems
• Appendix C: Chronology of progressive education in Japan
• Appendix D: Key figures
• Name index
• Subject index