ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 presents an innovative vision of school reform and democracy in Japan in the global era. Since the 1990s, the situation surrounding schools in Japan has changed drastically. Parallel to modern globalisation in East Asian countries including Japan, learning-centred lessons are being explored and new school reforms are being developed. Characteristics of society in the 21st century, such as knowledge-based, advanced-information, environmental-sustainable, multiculturalism, and the age of decline, have reached a global scale, far beyond the national territory of Asian countries. In an era in which knowledge is becoming more complex, synthetic, and professionalised, classroom learning tends to highlight student inquiry, creativity, critical thinking, community participation, and communication. As the world situation changed in the 1990s, interest in the reconstruction of public education has grown amidst the move from post—World War II educational systems to a new context in many countries characterised by the overwhelming victory of neoliberalism. Since the late 1990s, Japanese educational reform has put emphasis on ‘zest for living’ and has fostered marketisation, liberalisation, and deregulation. In that process, the idea of educational equality has been out of the question, and the school system has changed to foster inequality stemming from choice and competition. On the other hand, an important trend of school reform has emerged in the global era in the arenas of decentralisation, local sovereignty, and community schools, promoting the intimacy and caring of a home or homelike environment in education. This chapter discusses democracy and school reform in Japan that connect East Asia’s past, present, and future.
