Secondary Education Reform and the Concept of Equality of Opportunity in Japan

Abstract

This paper aims to throw light on the evolution and historical transformation of the concept of equality of opportunity as applied to educational policies in Japan from the end of World War II to the present day. It analyses the Central Council for Education's (CCE) reform proposals in the 1990s, and places them in the context of developing the concept of equality of educational opportunity in the years since 1945, when the post‐war education system was established in Japan. More specifically it addresses the following questions: What kinds of equality of educational opportunity have the central administrative bodies (Monbusho or the CCE), the political parties and teachers aimed to achieve since the war? How have they applied equality of opportunity to educational policies? What kinds of criteria are used by them to measure equality of educational opportunity? To do so, it looks in detail at the main agenda in relation to the issue of equal opportunity in the reports by the CCE on both the state of education in the 1990s, and its transformation during the five decades since the war. To trace the historical transformation of the concept of equality of educational opportunity, this article selects two major explanatory models—egalitarianism and meritocracy. Although there is widespread agreement that equality of opportunity is a requirement of a just society in Japan, there is also widespread disagreement about just what this requirement amounts to and how it is to be balanced against other requirements such as ‘meritocracy’.