2-day open lecture by Dr.Yasuno Saito

We had a wonderful and meaningful 2-day open lecture by Dr.Yasuno Saito on Nov.6 and 7. On the first day, Dr. Saito kindly gave a lecture on the whole history of modern education system development in Japan from a socio-political perspective. According to the lecture, there were some factors contributing to successful, rapid development of modernization. Socially, there was no religious, linguistic obstacle in education and the public awareness of the importance of education was very high. Japan had not experienced colonization of any country and it provided diversity for benchmarking foreign education model. Politically, the Prime Minister of Cabinet promoted modernization of politics and the Minister of Education who had studied in the U.S. and U.K. had a strong will to modernize the education system in Japan. Fortunately, in spite of controversies and different views between conservative and progressive or practical lines, they shared the same goal on the educational development and national development. Finally, a full-fledged national education system and an efficient administration system which combined centralization and decentralization had been developed in Japan.

Second day’s lecture focused more on the issue of the universal primary education and popular literacy. At the beginning, Japan faced many difficulties such as parents’ discontents on Western textbooks, financial difficulties and extremely low attendance rate of girls. Dr. Saito showed us an interesting photo of “Komori class” and some questions in the test and a survey actually conducted at that time. The experience of how Japan achieved universal primary education and fought against illiteracy can be a very helpful lesson for many developing countries.
As a foreign student, I enjoyed the lectures very much. It gave me a systematical understanding on the history of educational development in Japan and a good idea of analyzing socio-political factors influencing educational development.