2011 Volume 78 Issue 2 Pages 114-125
In order to examine whether the borders between education and labor on the one hand and welfare on the other have been blurred or not in recent Japan, this article gives an outline of phenomena around these boundaries. The education as a social sphere can be depicted to have two borders: one is the inner-border which divides formal school education and other informal and non-formal educational activities, another is the outer-border which divides education as a whole and the environment of education. We focus on the inner-border because the formal school education has been situated at the core of education in modern societies. Concerning the border between school education and labor, the smoothness of the transition from school to work has been vitiated markedly in recent years, while the vocational relevance of the curriculum content of school education in Japan is still as low as ever. Concerning the border between school education and welfare, school teachers often fail to link children or families with difficulties to social services. The inside of Japanese school education is characterized by the dominance of "gakuryoku" (academic achievement) as the selection criterion with its reflective functioning and the density of the relational pressures among students and teachers. These phenomena imply that Japanese school education has a stubborn barrier around it and has been closed within that barrier. To give a theoretical interpretation to the features of the borders of the Japanese education described above, Niklas Luhmann's systems theory proves to be instructive. According to Luhmann, a social system, in general, has its own binary code as "a symbolically generalized communication medium," while the education system has only a medium which is not generalized as a binary code such as "child" or "life-course." A social system manages the connection with other systems in the form of "the paradox expansion," processing the problems posed by other systems into opposing two-fold plans, taking them into the system itself, and oscillating between them. Among the attempts to apply Luhmann's theory to the education system in Japan, there is a proposition that the binary code specific to the education system should be "able/unable." Although this proposition fits well to the actual state of Japan, the fact itself is deeply related to the stubborn closeness of Japanese school education. Therefore this article proposes that the education system should not have a binary code which stigmatize the "unable," but should take the responsibility both to identify the current state of learners and at the same time to open "the other possibility" to them. In addition to that, to make the relations to other systems more in tune, the school education must reinforce its mechanism of "the paradox expansion," through the differentiation of the courses and curriculum of the upper secondary education for example.
