ABSTRACT
Reiterating the history of the National Courses of Study as a national curriculum from the present perspective, the curriculum has been organised in the form of a debate on academic achievement facing competition between child-centred education and discipline-centred education. In the early post-war years, a series of works rejecting Japan's pre-war militaristic education sparked a reform of the curriculum, which aimed to promote democratic education in Japan. The curriculum in the post-war period of new education focused on problem-solving learning that developed the independent aspect of academic ability. The curriculum in the period of modernisation focused on discipline as an objective aspect of academic ability. The review of the relaxed education policy caused a shift in the view of academic ability from the view of new academic ability to that of comprehensive learning ability. The ability to use knowledge and skills shows developmental aspects of academic ability in response to the influence of the concept of literacy in the PISA.
