Hikaku Kyoiku Gaku he no Hihanteki Apurochi

At a symposium entitled Japanese Education: A Nation at Risk, Beyond Dichotomies of Achievement and Chaos at the 49th annual meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society in March 2005, American professors of Japanese education, who served as the discussants for the session, shared the observation that Japanese education and American education are moving "in opposite directions". They explained that while American education was centralizing its institutional and pedagogical authorities and was shifting from progressive pedagogical beliefs toward testing, standards, and core curriculum, Japanese education, by contrast, was shifting toward decentralization, curricular differentiation, and a progressive pedagogical ethos under the humanizing slogans of kosei (individuality) and yutori (more room for growth). On the other side of the Pacific, the same observation had gained a near-common-sense status. Many Japanese critics of the controversial 2002 yutori education reform argued that the reform was misguided because it was the antithesis of the "international trend", namely, American and British education reforms which were pursuing more rigorous curriculum, competition and testing. They warned that the reform could significantly undermine Japan's international economic competitiveness and thus put "the nation at risk". Although these critics' proposed alternatives differed from each other because of their different ideological positions, they were unanimous for the observation that the current Japanese education reform was antithetical to Anglo-American education reforms. Thus the consensus has been that Japanese and American education systems are ships passing in the night. Drawing on post-colonial discourse studies and cultural studies, 1 extract from this observation an Orientalist binary paradigm that continues to set discursive limits on the way Japanese and Anglo-American observers make sense of each other's education. It is argued that the predominance of this Orientalist binary paradigm in comparative discussions of Japanese and Anglo-American education has resulted in the unfortunate lack of scholarly efforts to take full account of the common global structural changes in education driven by neoliberal and neoconservative impulses. As a crucial step towards the critical, reflexive engagement with the continuing colonial legacy, I propose a critical approach to comparative education that enables us to discuss localised and nationalised differences in education changes within the common frame of global structural changes in economy, state and education. In conclusion, I identify the Orientalist binary paradigm and academic neocolonialism as the crucial impediments to the establishment of the global network of progressive alliance and discusses how critical education and comparative education researchers can begin to tackle these obstacles to contribute to the development of the global network "from below" against the neoliberal-led destruction of public education around the world. [Chapter is in Japanese]