Abstract
This article examines the revision of the School Education Law in June 2007, and takes a critical view of contemporary curriculum policies which would revise that law, although there were many objections about it. In a sense these policies must reveal the situation that the Japanese schooling system had to face after the revision of the Fundamental Law of Education in 2006. For about ten years, educational reforms have been constantly carried out. There have been two major ideological currents: neo-conservatism or neo-nationalism, and neo-liberalism. But in this revision of the School Education Law, it appears that neo-conservatism or neo-nationalism was more dominant than neo-liberalism. The curriculum policies embedded in the 2007 revision seem to be characterised as neo-conservative. The policies would promote moral education and would enable the schools to teach pupils and students conservative or nationalistic values. Evidently the aim of the policies was directed to reinforce governmental control of education and school curriculum. These facts are indeed very important, but this article draws the following conclusions. First, contemporary educational reforms are led by the powerfully bound combination of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism. The neo-conservative aspect which dominantly veiled the curriculum policies in the revision of the School Education Law is just one side of the whole process of educational reforms now. Secondly, curriculum policies these days are interpreted as the result of the mixture of two means. One is direct governmental control of the curriculum as suggested in the revised School Education Law in 2007. The other is the indirect one such as the national achievement test started in 2007. For a while both will be exploited occasionally by curriculum policies.
