教育計画の経済的基盤をめぐる諸理論

序論的考察

抄録

European countries are now confronted with the urgent necessity of educational expansion. In order to build sufficient schools for expanding school-age population and to provide more institutions of secondary and higher education so that they may have equal opportunity of education and to keep pace with the rapid development of industry, they are necessiated to invest much more money in education. Hitherto, most of them spent about 3 or 4 percent of national income for education, but it is thought that they have to make this proportion higher in future. In these circumstances European educationalists and economists began to study educational planning keeping in close relation with the economic growth of their countries, and these movements gave birth to a new study field, “economics of education.” In Germany Professor F. Edding (Director of the Hochschule ftir Internationale Padagogische Forschung) has studied the macro-economic backgrounds of educational expenditures and found out some tendencies in their developments in modern countries. On the basis of these findings he tried to work out an analysing and forecasting method of educational expenditures of countries. By using this method, he tried to forecast the total educational expenditure of West-Germany in 1970, and explored the possibility of financing it on the basis of the possible economic growth of West-Germany by 1970.
In October 1961 OECD held a conference in Washington on the “Economic Growth and Investment in Education.” Profs. Svennilson, Edding and Elvin wrote a report of this conference, in which we canfind that Prof. Edding has improved his forecasting method of educational expenditure and that many more economic aspects of educational developments have been elucidated. This analysing and forecasting method of educational expenditure is very useful in studying various cases in educational finance in our country.
According to Prof. Edding, there is a close correlation between national income and educational expenditure (0.992 in 1951), but Japan and the Soviet Union are exceptions to this close correlation. They show much higher ratios of investment in education than expected by their economic levels. He says that, in these countries, there is a strong will to improve the position of the country within a short sran of time. This interpretation is very interesting and instructive in evaluating the progress of modernization of our country. We can learn from these studies not only a method of a long-range educational planning but also clues to historical review.