Home > Policy > White Paper, Notice, Announcement > White Paper > Japanese Government Policies in Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology 2001 >Chapter4

Public confidence in education has been wavering in recent years. This is partly due to the problematic behavior of children that has surfaced in society, such as the absence of sociality in children and class disruptions. At the same time, people are dissatisfied with the current state of education, saying it does not sufficiently take into account each child's individuality and ability, nor it does not keep up with an increasingly globalizing and changing society stemming from the recent IT revolution and rapid technological advancements. These complaints also affect public confidence in education.

  At the bottom of this problem are educators, from the elementary, secondary and higher education levels, who lack awareness and are not sufficiently prepared to respond to public expectations of social change while holding onto basic principles that are worth protecting through time. One of the major issues in educational reform is to realize an educational system that is responsive to societal change and the concerns of people by way of drastically changing the mentality of those concerned with education.

  In the past, schools tended to be managed under self-contained organizations and principles that were not responsive to movements in society. The realization of an educational system for the new times requires rethinking the role of schools in relation to society and making them open, trustworthy and responsive to the surrounding community. To this end, boards of education should support schools and actively play a role in educational administration. Schools, for their part, should give consideration to the demands of families and communities, and be accountable to parents and residents through the explanation of educational activities.

  MEXT has been taking the necessary measures with the following objectives: {1} promote decentralization and vitalize boards of education so that they can undertake responsible educational administration that accurately responds to the various needs of local residents and thus supports the creative efforts of schools; {2} build schools open to the community through, for example, the introduction of a school adviser system, a mechanism to incorporate the opinions of the community into school management and the establishment of self-evaluation systems within schools; {3} expand a school's discretion regarding the employment of personnel and budgets so that each one can develop its own unique characteristics under the leadership of its principal; {4} establish a system for the appropriate evaluation and treatment of teachers; and {5} provide training systems and a competitive environment through which teachers can improve their abilities and sociality toward the realization of a school's purpose by working hard together.