ABSTRACT
Education has always been treated with great seriousness by the Japanese. They have always understood its significance as a means of ensuring power, or conversely its potential for undermining that power. It is especially the case that any account of the evolution of modern Japan must give prominence to education in that process, since education was central to the strategy of Meiji Japan in its paramount desire to modernise. We have seen the spirit of learning in the way in which the Charter Oath exhorted the search for ‘knowledge’ from all over the world. But in its establishment of formal educational structures, especially because it was to the west that they turned for models, the Meiji regime recognised at once the tensions which are generic in education, and set out to resolve them. The most important of these derives from the clarity of purpose which people in authority suppose is the basis of education. For them this purpose is functional, that is to train people for the demands of modern industrial work, whether in the practical skills of the nineteenth century, or the technological advances characteristic of the present day.
