PRINCIPLE, PRAXIS AND THE POLITICS OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN MEIJI JAPAN

Scholars of modern Japan agree that education played a crucial role in that country's rapid modernization during the Meiji period (1868-1912). With few exceptions, however, Western approaches to the subject treat education as an instrument of change controlled by the Meiji political and intellectual elite. Principle, Praxis, and the Politics of Educational Reform in Meiji Japan offers a corrective to this view. By introducing primary source materials (including teaching manuals, educational periodicals, and primary school textbooks) missing from most English-language works, Mark Lincicome examines an early case of resistance to government control that developed within the community of professional educators. He focuses on what began, in 1872, as an attempt by the newly established Ministry of Education to train a corps of professional teachers that could 'civilize and enlighten' the masses in compulsory primary schools. Through the Tokyo Normal School and other new teacher training schools sponsored by the government, the ministry began what it thought was a straightforward 'technology transfer' of the latest teaching methods and materials from the United States and Europe. Little did the ministry realize that it was planting the seeds of broader reform that would challenge not only its underlying doctrine of education, but its very authority over education.(...)