- 著者
-
中嶋 哲彦
- 出版者
- 日本教育行政学会
- 雑誌
- 日本教育行政学会年報 (ISSN:09198393)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.39, pp.53-67, 2013-10-11 (Released:2018-01-09)
Though Japanese statesmen were apt to refrain from using the word "national strategy," it has been used frequently in political documents since about 2000. The Japanese government recognized the importance of "state reform," and determined to decide on a national strategy for the overall reform of the sate and to set up the council that would take charge of this mission. It is not accidental that these occurred almost simultaneously. The necessity of the neo-liberal reform of the state had been recognized by some of statesmen and bureaucrats in the late 1990s. Under the welfare-state regime, the economic freedoms of the monopoly capitals and the wealthy had been restricted in order to secure the minimum conditions under which the every people enjoy the healthy and cultured life. And the equal opportunity for free education is available to all people. On one hand, the securing of this equal opportunity had been requested as a human rights, while it was also the necessary condition for developing industrial capitalism, to supply the large quantities of high-quality labor forces. But, under the current conditions of globalization and international competition, many countries have been confronted with difficulties in maintaining their welfare-state regimes including the equal opportunity of education, and reforming their school systems based on the "choice and concentration" doctrine. The newly established council was named the Council on Economics and Fiscal Policy, and the Prime Minister is designated the chairperson. It functioned as the headquarters to formulate the national strategy, based on the neo-liberal ideas such as marketization, privatization, deregulation and decentralization. The educational policies formulated by the council are as follows. 1) The deregulation of various school standards, such as curriculum standard, school establishment standards, and teacher's licensing, etc.. 2) The application of the "choice and concentration" doctrine to educational funding. 3) The competition, management by object, evaluation. 4) The marketization of education, such as school management by for-profit private companies, school voucher systems, and charter schools, etc.. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology was assigned the task of accomplishing all these polices. But the Ministry has opposed the marketization of education since the 1990s, when the Deregulation Committee suggested the school choice policy, so the marketization of education was not carried out as planned by the Council. The reasons why the Ministry objects to the marketization of education must be examined later. Decentralization is another element of the national strategy. The more the decentralization reforms proceed, the more the governors and mayors will try to intervene in the school management and the administration of the board of education. This is another question.