| Japanese education policies have been an enigma past 25 years. Frequent policy changes force schools to change directions continuously. Education-related laws have undergone many revisions, changing teachers' roles and school administrators' roles and changing education from a right of children to a right of the state. The educational goal also shifted from acquisition of content knowledge in the 1980's to the display of state-designated attitudes. The dispositions the state instructed students to display shifted from enthusiasm, interests, and willingness in the early 1990's to "rich humanities" in the late 1990's, then to "love for the nation" in the 21st century. Japanese schools stopped producing competent knowledge workers and are now raising willing and enthusiastic patriots.;The aim of this project is to establish the following theses: 1. The said chaotic education policies are major part of three-stage education restructuring since the early 1990's, which originally started as a response to the capitalist crisis and the end of the industrialization period in Japan. Schools contribute to crisis management by instilling consciousness among the lay public -- first, neoliberalistic, then nationalistic false consciousness -- that are easy to govern. 2. The first stage was spent on creative destruction of the conventional mass meritocracy by means of neoliberalism. After the first phase came a formation of pseudo-national consensus, where most vocal agencies agreed that public education in Japan needed to be further reformed. 3. Upon this pseudo-consensus, during the third stage, public education was reborn to be a machine that produces dumbed-down mass on the one hand but also raises a small number of elites. To bind the two polarized strata, schools concurrently instill nationalism in both groups. As a consequence, schools now serve as a machine of stratification, re-integration, and surveillance. 4. Both means and the end of this restructuring are highly anti-democratic, the aim being disempowerment and submission of the students, teachers, and the families. A wide range of stakeholders concerted their efforts to achieve said end, until the ubiquitous imposition of the nationalistic false consciousness comes to resemble fascism. |
