Global Leadership Training for High School Students in Japan: Are Global Leadership Competencies Trainable, Universal, and Measurable?

Abstract

Starting in 2014, as part of the nation’s effort to train future global leaders, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports Science and Technology (MEXT) designated 56 high schools as “Super Global High Schools” (SGH). Their goal is to develop global leadership competencies that go beyond simply fluency in English or acquiring specific knowledge, which were the goals of earlier projects. In order to understand the nature of the global leadership competencies that the SGH project is trying to develop, we examined the winning high school proposals in 2014, MEXT’s evaluation criteria for those proposals, the characteristics of the schools selected, and the activities undertaken as part of the SGH project. We apply Anderson’s (1991) notion of imagined communities to argue that the SGH project was developed based on an image of a global elite and that it reflects an ideology in which global leadership competencies are universal, trainable, tangible, and measurable. In reality, however, we argue that they are more likely to be multi-dimensional and highly context-dependent. Developing such competencies therefore requires substantial conceptual and practical changes in Japanese education. In addition, we find that the current SGH model focuses on select Japanese nationals that come from privileged backgrounds.