Education Reform: Can the Japanese Change their Education System?

The seminar marked the publication of Can the Japanese Change Their Education System? edited by Roger Goodman and David Phillips, part of the Oxford Studies in Comparative Education series.

It analysed the success or otherwise of reform efforts in Japanese education since the Second World War. Contributors addressed a wide variety of themes from differing perspectives, their articles ranging from a historical study of reform efforts during the military occupation of Japan, through an analysis of educational developments under Prime Minister Nakasone, to the practical effects of changes in the teaching of mathematics.

About the contributors:

Professor Roger Goodman
Roger Goodman is Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies at the Universityof Oxfordwhere he has been Head of the Social Sciences Division since 2008. His publications include Japan’s International Youth: The Emergence of a New Class of Schoolchildren (1990) and Children of the Japanese State: The Changing Role of Child Protection Institutions in Contemporary Japan (2000) both of which have also been published in Japanese versions. He has also edited or co-edited a further eleven books including The East Asian Welfare Model: Welfare Orientalism and the State (1998); Family and Social Policy in Japan (2002); Can the Japanese Change their Education System’ (2002); Global Japan: The Experience of Japan’s New Immigrant and Overseas Communities (2003), The ‘Big Bang’ in Japanese Higher Education: The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change (2005), Ageing in Asia: Asia’s Position in the New Global Demograph (2007) and A Sociology of Japanese Youth Problems: From Returnees to NEET’ (forthcoming, 2011). His main research interests are in the education and social welfare systems of modernJapan.

Professor David Phillips
David Phillips is Professor of Comparative Education and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall,University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has recently been elected an Academician of the new Social Sciences Academy. He is editor of the Oxford Review of Education and series editor of Oxford Studies in Comparative Education, and is the author of several books and many articles on comparative studies in education, with a particular focus on Germany and on aspects of ‘educational borrowing’.

Professor Goodman and Professor Phillips were also joined in the panel discussion by Dr Christopher Hood, Ms Yoko Tsuruta and Ms Julia Whitburn.