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Contesting Children’s Citizenship Education: What Should Japanese Children Know?

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Power in Contemporary Japan

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Abstract

Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak addresses four questions about children’s citizenship education, as a way to understand how power is constructed in contemporary Japan. In crafting and contesting curriculum, diverse political actors construct power among themselves and weave webs of meaning that remain available for future generations. More specifically, Tegtmeyer Pak argues that the popular arguments of right-wing traditionalists versus leftist opposition oversimplify the complex contingencies of children’s citizenship education. The Japanese school curriculum teaches multiple values about power, because diverse, contested interactions stretch across the Parliament, bureaucracy, and into the schools. The formal curriculum follows global patterns as it combines national history, patriotism, and democratic values. The hidden curriculum, which guides how children interact with each other and teachers, demonstrates some national distinctiveness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the following discussion, I combine the “major emphasis” and “some emphasis” replies from Table 4 (Schulz and International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement 2010, pp. 29–30).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Asian Studies and Political Science, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, USA

    Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak

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  1. Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Institute for the Liberal Arts, Doshisha University, Japan

    Gill Steel

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Pak, K.T. (2016). Contesting Children’s Citizenship Education: What Should Japanese Children Know?. In: Steel, G. (eds) Power in Contemporary Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59193-7_2

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