ABSTRACT
The aim of education, elementary and advanced, is to clarify human relationships. In the elementary program of education the various human relationships are made clear. What is important for our purposes is to note that the Tokugawa political tradition was one in which educational policy, like other matters of public policy, was left largely in the hands of these domain governments. This does not mean that there were over 250 separate styles of political rule or 250 educational philosophies. By the early nineteenth century three distinct intellectual currents flowed through the educational field and affected the content of school curriculum as well as administrative policy. To speak of an educational "system" or "state policy" in Tokugawa Japan is misleading. Private academies were not ordinarily licensed or otherwise subject to regular official supervision, but they sometimes provided the original institutional base for the development of other types of educational institutions that did directly involve government at one level or another.
