현대일본의 교육개혁: '유토리교육'이 논리와 동요

Abstract

This paper aims to assess the education reform in Japan and identify its inherent limits and problems. Since the late 1980s, Japan has embarked on the education reform to address the challenges of globalization and informatization and to cope with the problems of the existing education system. The main pillar of the reform was so-called 'Yutori-education'. At the core of the 'yutori education' was child-centred education. The new approach of the child-centred education placed its emphasis on experience-based learning, presentation, creativity and individuality, while criticizing the knowledge- and test-centered education. However, years of experiments did not yield what were expected from Yutori-education. There were wide spread observations that students' willingness and abilities to learn and their educational performances were deteriorating ever since. On the one hand, the reform lacked systematic conception and execution based on the concrete analyses of the conditions and environments of the Japanese education. On the other hand, the reformers failed to consider the impacts of the socio-structural changes on the education. The followings were such factors: post-industrial turn, limits of the East Asian paths of Modernization, globalization and neoliberalism, changing employment structures, crisis or breakdown of the Japanese families, rising high mass consumption society, and speed-up of the transition to the information society. Eventually, the Yutori Education approach drifted away, arousing mounting public criticism and concerns, to the extent that it went to the direction of the 'reinforcement of the knowledge-centered education' and of the 'differentiation' education'. In this situation, it is very likely that neoliberalism and statism would become the two main pillars of the Basic Education Act reform under public discussion now.