Private Schools in Alternative Education Before the Beginning of the Free School Movement

– Examining Hiraku Toyama and Harumi Yasugi’s Theories in the 1970s and 1980s –

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify the true state of alternative education prior to the Free School Movement by examining the theories developed regarding private schools during the 1970s and 1980s. To this end, we focused on discussing the theories of mathematician Hiraku Toyama and the cram school teacher Harumi Yasugi. Educational opportunities for the youth in post-war Japan can largely be roughly divided into public or private education. With the exception of homeschooling, private education mainly consisted of cram schools, an institution outside of school. Supplementary cram schools, which were a particular type of cram school that emerged at the beginning of the 1970s, pursued a different set of values than school education, acting as a support system for the youth who withdrew from school. Although previous research in the study of education, sociology, etc. has generally overlooked this fact, supplementary cram schools functioned as a form of alternative education prior to the Free School Movement. In this paper, we revealed the reality of private schools as alternative education by examining the theories of Toyama and Yasugi.