ABSTRACT
Since there is !ittle educational substance in simulated academics, administrators and professors find it quite easy to dispense with genuine educational practices. aim for the lowest standards, and ignore hard choices ab out the best way to run a schoo!. Quantity is privileged over quality, expediency over standards, and administrative convenience over academic accomplishment. In some cases, administrators drop all pretense of having any concern with real teaching and learning. In other cases, they speak out of both sides oftheir mouths, extolling the virtues of quality education while issuing policy directives that gut useful classroom practices. In addition to producing doublethink, simulated education seems to create an institutional atmosphere in which people come to believe their own rhetoric. 1
In this chapter I discuss how simulated education easily results in contradictory po!icies and operations in many of Japan's daigaku (though the more elite schools suffer less from this problem), and I provide concrete examples of the results of simulated education. I conclude with a discussion of the "law of ritual compensation": the more ~imulated an institution becomes, the more ritualized and elaborate its associated ceremonies and activities become.
