公立学校における手続保障と公共性

―生徒指導における「手続」に着目して―

抄録

Against a backdrop of the diversification of values in Japanese society, this paper aims to evaluate the increasing popularity of public schools' attempts to guarantee publicness by implementing new procedures and justifying their outcomes. The paper makes the following two arguments:

Firstly, revision of the processes and procedures of school education, especially in student guidance, has the potential to promote publicness. For example, based on the relationship between publicness and the establishment of the Act for the Promotion of Measures to Prevent Bullying, this paper reveals:

1. increased official participation as a result of legal involvement in resolving issues related to bullying,

2. increased commonality as a result of recognizing the need for lawor guideline-based responses, and

3. increased openness as a result of bullying response procedures becoming transparent to the public.

It is argued that implementing such procedures is linked to increased publicness at a micro level in student guidance. In other words, it can be said that “procedure” occupies an important position as a condition in ensuring publicness.

Secondly, although there has been a noted rise in procedural justice theories in the field, some aspects of the procedures and operations regarding disciplining high school students lack transparency. Thus the guarantee of publicness remains questionable. More specifically, while official involvement is guaranteed, it is difficult to claim that commonality and openness are also sufficiently guaranteed. Today, procedural justice is viewed as important in educational settings; yet, the appropriateness of disciplinary results cannot be judged collectively. Therefore, establishing transparent disciplinary procedures that can be traced later is an important perspective in the guidance of students, and may well be useful in increasing trust in educational administration.