Sakai Akira

This study discusses matters concerning the relationship between society and education in contemporary Japan and examines problems that have occurred in various fields of education based on the concept of social exclusion and social inclusion.<BR><BR>Many developed industrial countries have problems with correlations among various social sectors and become unable to sustain satisfactory social unification. J. Young called this rapid change in the social system the advent of the exclusive society.<BR><BR>In the era of the exclusive society, education is evaluated highly as the major tool of social welfare for the young. However, actual educational performance as well as children's lives and their learning are influenced enormously by the exclusive society. School education is not linked smoothly with the labor market and some citizens face high risks as they are not allowed full participation in society.<BR><BR>The early stage of the cumulative exclusive process is embedded in school education. This study analyzes problems of "children who do not go to school," that is, children who do not go to school, "out-of-school" children, high school dropouts, and children with long-term absence from school.<BR><BR>In order to step forward into social inclusion, we should pay more attention to children who have a high risk of exclusion from society in the future. Various social sectors are expected to cooperate in order to support those high-risk children, and the educational system should be scrutinized and reformed from the point of view of social inclusion. Concrete suggestions are required for high school education that will meet the pressure for guaranteeing high-quality education.

Many children experience problems during the process of transiting from nursery schools or kindergartens to elementary schools. One of the reasons is the difference of teaching methods between early childhood education and elementary education. Educational administrators explain this difference as corresponding to the two different developmental stages; early childhood and childhood.<br> This study describes in detail the teaching methods of early childhood education and elementary education, and examines their historical and social backgrounds. It then analyzes the dominant discourse which connects the difference with developmental stage theory and suggests an alternative approach to integrating the teaching methods by considering kindergartners and elementary school students as children in an integrated way.<br> Early childhood education in Japan accomplishes its aims through children's lives and play. The key phrase of its method is "educating children through the environment." The major role of kindergarten teachers as well as nursery school teachers is to constitute the environment surrounding children from an educational point of view. Children are supposed to engage independently in various activities which interest them. <br> The aims of elementary education are accomplished by integrating all the outcomes of activities in schools, such as subject teaching, moral education, and extracurricular activities. Teachers make their teaching plans based on the annual teaching schedule and are to teach systematically and progressively. <br> The difference of teaching methods between early childhood education and elementary education is partly explained by the historical backgrounds of the two education systems. The Japanese early childhood education system was introduced separately from the elementary school system during the Meiji era. The present gap is also caused by different methods of handling the educational reform movement during the 1980s, which emphasized students' individualization and their independent minds. <br> However, educational administrators often explain the dissimilarities of these teaching methods as a result of the difference between the two developmental stages. This development theory functions to justify the existing difference. But the theory has been questioned for many years by educational psychologists, and many scholars report that five-year-olds should be treated like elementary school pupils. There are some possibilities of lowering the elementary school entrance age to five if we depend too much on the psychological developmental stage theory.<br> We need to start to discuss methods of educating children based on the findings of educational theory as well as those of early childhood education theory. In order to start the discussions which will connect teaching methods, we need to examine the three themes below.<br>1. Composing an overall curriculum which considers children's cumulative experiences.<br>2. Capturing young people as children in an integrated way.<br>3. Connecting the two teaching methods; the method of "educating through the environment" and the theory of class design.

The Teaching Profession Support Center of Otsuma Women's University conducted a survey on the attitudes and learning of students who took teacher training courses at four universities in Tokyo metropolitan area in the fall of 2012. It asked them motivation towards teaching professions, learning attitudes and their self-evaluation on teaching competence. About 70% of respondents wanted to be teachers and 30% answered they became thinking to be teachers in their high school days. Although most students studied hard their major subjects as well as teacher training course curriculum, they did not get relevant information actively, nor do they read books on education independently. They highly evaluated their own attitude of accepting advice from colleagues and learning of their specialties.

This paper focuses on the students' maladjustment in the process of school transition and explores its social background factors. It also speculates about the effects and problems of collaboration among preschools, elementary schools and secondary schools. Partly because the Japanese government has adopted a 6-3-3 education system for more than 60 years, the Japanese education system has developed specific programs for methodological socialization at each school level. We should understand that school transition is not merely an environmental change but it urges students to be exposed to powerful and methodological messages for re-socialization from school to school. Students' maladjustment can be understood as a reaction against these re-socializing messages. School transition and school collaboration in Japan are related with fundamental educational issues of how our society raises and educates young people. The current Fundamental Law on Education and the School Education Law hold up an ideal of consistency and continuity of teaching. Based on these fundamental acts guidelines for the course of study just revised in 2008 emphasize enrichment of preschool education based on the principle of pursuing developmental and learning continuity for children. They also emphasize consistency of the curriculum contents of elementary and secondary education. But these acts and the guidelines take for granted the present education system and aim at smooth transition between different levels of school. The actual practices for school collaboration often just consist of holding student exchange programs and suffer from the "activity trap." We cannot often find reliable relationship in those activities with the goal of "articulation" among schools. School collaboration is a project where teachers of different schools find difference in their teaching and caring methods by themselves. In order to establish collaborative relationships between schools, teachers are expected to communicate with each other intensively. I reported a discussion process in a teachers' committee to develop effective curriculum to articulate a kindergarten with an elementary school. Through the discussion, teachers came to find differences in their evaluation policy and in the conceptualization of curricula between the kindergarten and the elementary school. But they thought they did not have to eliminate these differences and tried to find strategies to articulate smoothly between the two institutions. We need to reflect more deeply about our own teaching and caring philosophy by ourselves and to revise our method of teaching and caring.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how part-time evening high school students change the self-definitions which they have once constructed, and also to reconsider from a sociological perspective the educational significance of part-time high schools that contribute to this process of redefinition. This paper looks at part-time evening high schools, which have generally been overlooked in the recent reforms of high school education. These schools were established after World War II to serve young working people, based on the fundamental ideology of equal educational opportunities. They contributed to the universalization of high school education. However, in recent years the number of such schools has been decreasing. The students absorbed into those schools have been placed as the bottom of the credentialist hierarchy, and have been analyzed as such in sociological studies. However, part-time evening high schools are unique public educational institutions, organized primarily for a diverse variety of working students both in age and in career. Thus, it is very important to investigate the role they play as educational institutions for adolescents and what actual conditions they are in from a sociological perspective. This also leads to a reconsideration of educational reform. The paper draws the following conclusion: from the narrative of part-time evening high school about how they decided to make a new commitment to their schools and society, it emerged that they use various resources in the process of re-defining themselves, such as the distribution of time, and identity based on schools, occupations and other human relationships. Information also acts as a resource for them. Therefore, this paper focuses on the organization of resources: time, information, and identity (Sandra Wallman, 1984). Moreover the results of the analysis confirm that after entrance into a part-time evening high school, students gain wider choices in their activities as organizing resources. This is peculiar to part-time evening high schools. Therefore, through their personalities, the motives and sense of value of their own social, educational environments is realized as this paper closely analyzes their narratives as a process of absorbing organizing resources. At the same time the following two aspects that exist in the institution of part-time evening high school are obtained. First, there is an opportunity for education to get new relations and knowledge. The second and more important finding is that there are possibilities for self re-definitions as unexpected consequences. (1) Many students gain experience working. This makes them to reconsider the "inside" of the school. (2) There is a process of "symbiosis" which is un-artificial at school. Finally, students need the processes of self redefinitions through various interactions, from which for the first time they can shoulder their 'self-decision' and 'self-responsibility' subjectively. Through its examinations, this paper attempts to present one perspective for reconsidering educational reforms. Accordingly, it is necessary to continue to focus on this issue.

Educational science is criticized for its ineffectiveness in treating actual problems that occur in schools or other educational settings. This situation should prompt researchers to conduct intensive investigations from a so-called "clinical" perspective. This article discusses the issue of how educational sociologists can contribute to this project. Because educational sociology has recently come to be seen as constituting a major part of educational sciences in Japan, it should bear some responsibilities for this discussion. First, this paper discusses the definition of the concept of "clinical" in the field of educational sociology. Some educational sociologists have offered definitions different from those of clinical psychologists, who hold hegemonic positions in the "clinical" sciences of education. It is contended here that the word "clinical" should be used in order to deal with more problematic matters, and a proposal is made that the main task of clinical educational sociology is to relativize our commonsense understanding of problems from a constructionist perspective, in order to find novel solutions. Secondly, the paper examines the stance that the field of educational sociology should take toward the "clinical" mode in educational sciences. In particular, the field must consider how to interpret and treat the phenomenon where many people are interested in their "inner selves." It is suggested that although sociologists criticize this trend, it should be accepted principally as one of the characteristic aspects of the postmodern era. Third, an examination is made of the methodological issues of clinical educational sociology. If "clinical" is defined from a constructionist framework, educational sociologists are involved in reconstructing the discourse of people who suffer from serious problems. If researchers want to contribute to the research field directly, it is possible to adopt the method of action research. When applying this method, there is a need to examine carefully the researcher's relationship to the field.