大学のユニバーサル化とエリート教育

抄録

　 The university has long been regarded as an institution for exclusively training the elite. For the several hundred years since the network of modern universities was completed during the 15 th century in the West, universities have, in fact, produced the social elite, and they have done so in an exclusive manner. After the end of the Second World War, however, sophisticated industrial restructuring and the “massification”of society have led to massification of higher education in almost all advanced nations. In a “massified”society, universities transform themselves into massive and massified systems, prompted by greater numbers of students, diversification, and division into increasingly smaller units, but in the process they lower educational standards and the students’intellectual quality.

　 In recent years, rapid advances in telecommunications and information technology have made institutions of higher learning almost universally accessible. The “universalization”of the university is progressing, along with corresponding changes in the organization and quality of higher education, just as the universities underwent transformation with their “massification”before the 1990s.

　 Training of the elite by the university has been particularly affected by the social phenomena of massification and universalization. Even massified and universalized universities continue to produce the social elite, for lack of bettersuited institutions. Elite candidates, however, are only a small fraction of the entire student population. Moreover, the boundary between ordinary students and “elite candidates”is now blurred. Special educational agendas for a handful of elite students have disappeared, at least from the undergraduate curriculum.

　 If society needs an elite population, where and how will such people be trained? One of the answers lies in “gifted and talented education.” This concept itself goes against the “equal and universal education”meted out according to the students’calendar age, but it is a first step towards achieving a flexible university education system. This concept is different from the conventional “elite”education in that it does not aim at producing a cluster of social elite, but encourages its eventual production by not stopping advanced education of the ablest. This kind of ability-based education has yet to develop methodology and must still overcome many social barriers. It is definitely not an easy course, but for many universities aggressive promotion of this type of education is the only practical course, given the current universalized education system and assuming universities do not want to revert to the elite education system of the past.