Public Education and Market : Interrelationship and its Transformation

Abstract

The educational theory in Post-war Japan has not recognized internal relationship between public education and the market. This paper first focuses on the internal relationship between modern public education and the market through the welfare state, then examines the transformation of such welfare state and also considers the alternative relationship between public education and the market incident to dissolution of the welfare state. The market can not guarantee its own reproduction. So, it has to introduce devices for reproducing human subsistence. The primary devices, as Althusser formulated, are a modern family and modern public education supported by the welfare state. Such reproduction system is also called"the social"by Hannah Arendt. After 1970's, the reproduction system supported by the welfare state faced a crisis. Under the circumstances, two approaches came to the theoretical and political surface. One was a communitarian approach, which aimed to embed back into the community the human subsistence that was reproduced by the modern family and the modern school supported by the welfare state. The other was a market-based approach or libertarian approach, which criticized dependence on the welfare state and tried to restore individuals'own decision making. However, neither approach could take into account the new public concept which would replace the old public concept represented by the welfare state. Bowles and Gintis are among the theorists who sought this new public concept. Bowles and Gintis proposed the "new rules for markets, states and communities"in 1996. In this proposition, they emphasized that egalitarian strategies had to abandon any attempt to outrage market outcome through taxation, which had been overly emphasized, and also had to change policies in the direction for reducing the consequences of concentrated ownership. Through this argument, they introduced a system for school choice as a new public education system. The school choice system untroduced by Bowles and Gintis was not considered as privatization of public education but a new public system. This point of view was also important in restructuring the postwar democracy and public education in Japan.