Development Education in Japan: A Comparative Analysis of the Contexts for Its Emergence, and Its Introduction into the Japanese School System

The previous two chapters discussed how the Japanese education system slowed down curriculum change. It was argued that the slow introduction of development education into the national curriculum in Japan could be explained by the difficulty generated in Japan's own education and curriculum-policy-making system.

Despite this difficulty with curriculum change at the national level however, small-scale attempts to introduce development education took place at school and classroom levels even before the Period of Integrated Study was introduced. While such schools existed, there were also schools where development education was not recognized at all. Thus, even within the same national curriculum, practice at the classroom and school levels is not necessarily identical. This difference between schools will increase within the new national curriculum, which allows schools more flexibility in their curricula than did the previous one.

The focus in chapters 7 and 8 is this variation among schools. In these chapters, the question why development education is introduced in some schools and not in others within the previous national curriculum is investigated through fieldwork.

Since the purpose of this fieldwork was to investigate why some schools could introduce development education with the same curriculum as others, schools that were operated under the same strict control of the curriculum were chosen. For this reason, state junior high schools that had less flexibility in curriculum than senior

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