Paper short abstract:

Recent reforms to the Japanese education system put an emphasis on student-centred teaching and learning. Such reforms are increasing social inequality due to the tendency for children from middle-class families to benefit more from increased diversity and choice in the curriculum.

Paper long abstract:

The post-war Japanese education system brought into being a system of intense competition for many pupils as they strove to succeed in tough exams in order to enter high-level senior high schools and then top universities. Criticism of both the stress brought about by this intense competition, and the reliance on the memorization of mountains of ‘facts’ (with each exam question only having one ‘correct’ answer) brought about calls for reforms that would allow students more room to breathe and more scope to express their own creativity.

Reforms in the 1990s and 2000s put an emphasis on student-centred teaching and learning. For the 1992 reform, MEXT called for “teachers to see children as having the desire to improve themselves to seek for a better life and possess a variety of good qualities and potential unique to them as individuals.” Few could disagree with these aims. Unfortunately the movement away from a curriculum based on strict uniformity has led to increased inequality due to the fact that middle class families are better able to exploit the opportunities of a system which contains more flexibility, individualization and choice than previously.

Drawing on the work of sociologists of education Kariya Takehiko and Stephen Ball, this paper explores the ways in which social class is reproduced in the reformed Japanese education system. This paper builds on previous research by making use of the concepts of cultural and human capital to argue that even when most of the costs of primary and secondary education are borne by the state – as they are in Japan – it is children from middle-class families who will able to take most of the advantages offered by a system based on choice, flexibility and curriculum that encourages individual development.