Schooling Selves: Autonomy, Interdependence and Reform in Japanese Junior High Education, by Peter Cave
Schooling Selves: Autonomy, Interdependence and Reform in Japanese Junior High Education, by Peter Cave
复制标题
学校教育自我：日本初中教育的自主性、相互依存性与改革，作者：Peter Cave
DOI：
10.1080/09555803.2017.1378700
复制
发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
0.6
通讯作者：
Robert W. Aspinall
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Robert W. Aspinall
在日本，改革派认为特别难以改变的学校是在第二次世界大战后建立的义务教育制度的中学部分中负责教育12至15岁儿童的初中制度。这是教育系统中至关重要的一部分，也是彼得·凯夫的著作《自我教育》的重点，这是自2000年杰拉尔德·勒滕德尔的《学习成为青少年》出版以来，第一次对这一领域进行深入分析。凯夫的书以个人主义和相关概念的讨论开始了对20世纪90年代和21世纪初改革的考察。凯夫指出，“虽然强调个性”是改革的中心主题，但个性”本身就是一个模糊的概念“（第38页）。在这本发人深省的书中，一个经常被提到的难题是，既然儿童需要他人的支持才能发展成为自主的个体，教师如何在提供支持和结构之间取得适当的平衡，同时促进冒险和自由探究？这对世界各地的教师来说都是一个挑战，但在日本的初中，由于这些学校以纪律、秩序和遵守纪律而闻名，这一挑战尤其突出。凯夫广泛的人种学田野调查为这项研究提供了原始数据，主要是在日本中西部近畿地区一个中等城市的两所公立初中进行的。对该地区的其他学校进行了较短的访问，包括私立初中和juku（补习学校）。纵向实地考察的时间跨度为1994年至2007年，这使得凯夫能够见证两项相关改革努力的兴衰;“综合学习”（sogo-teki na gakushu）和“选修科目”的引入，这两项改革的目的都是让学校和个别儿童有更多的灵活性和选择。为什么这些改革失败了？其中一个关键问题是缺乏培训，以及负责在genba（实际开展教育的场所）实施改革的教师缺乏准备时间。凯夫发现，“在校外学习综合研究的意愿.主要是自愿的，似乎只有少数教师采取了这种做法”（第149页）。结果，实践中的综合研究项目被证明是准备不足的临时活动，或者是预先存在的活动，如农村实地考察旅行，只是被赋予了一个新的标签。教师对选修科目也缺乏热情，在选修科目中，“自主学习”往往被简化为学生在最低限度的教师投入下填写表格。170-172）。从教师的角度来看，新一轮改革的问题之一是，它们对他们的时间提出了一系列新的要求，而没有相应地减少现有的工作量，这些工作量往往相当大（第100页）。179-182）。为了更全面地解释改革的失败，也为了帮助改进分析亚洲或其他地区类似情况的理论工具，凯夫使用了新制度分析（第177页）。这种社会学范式有助于我们理解，历史悠久、被广泛接受的机构，如日本的初中，不可避免地培养了那些在那里工作的人认为理所当然的规则、脚本和分类。这些学校的老师们
The schools that reformers have found especially difficult to change in Japan comprise the system of junior high schools (chugakko) that are responsible for educating children aged twelve to fifteen in the secondary part of the compulsory education system that was set up after the Second World War. It is this crucial part of the system that is the focus of Peter Cave’s book, Schooling Selves, the first in-depth analysis of this sector since Gerald LeTendre’s Learning to be Adolescent published in 2000. Cave’s book begins its examination of the reforms of the 1990s and 2000s with a discussion of individualism and related concepts. Cave points out that ‘though emphasizing individuality” was a central theme of the reforms, individuality” was an inherently ambiguous concept’(p. 38). A conundrum constantly returned to in this thought-provoking book is that since children need the support of others in order to develop into autonomous individuals, how can teachers strike the right balance between providing support and structure while, at the same time, promoting risktaking and free inquiry? This is a challenge for teachers the world over, but in Japan’s junior high schools it has particular salience due to those schools’ reputation for discipline, order, and conformity. Cave’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork that provides the raw data for this study was conducted mostly in two public junior high schools in a medium-sized city in the Kinki region in West-central Japan. Shorter visits were made to other schools in the area, including private junior high schools and juku (cram schools). The longitudinal fieldwork spans the period from 1994 to 2007, which allows Cave to bear witness to the rise and fall of two related reform efforts; the introduction of ‘integrated studies’(sogo-teki na gakushu) and ‘elective subjects’, both of which were designed to allow schools and individual children more flexibility and choice. Why did these reforms fail? One of the key problems was the lack of training, combined with the lack of preparation time given to the teachers who were tasked with implementing the reforms at the genba (the sites where education is actually carried out). Cave found that ‘[o] pportunities to learn about integrated studies outside schools were… largely voluntary and seem to have been taken up only by a minority of teachers’(p. 149). As a result, integrated studies programs in practice turned out to be poorly prepared ad hoc activities, or pre-existing activities like fieldwork trips to the countryside that were merely given a new label. Enthusiasm was also lacking among teachers for elective subjects where ‘independent learning’was often reduced to students filling-out worksheets with minimum teacher input (pp. 170–172). From the teachers’ point of view, one of the problems with the new set of reforms is that they imposed a new set of demands on their time with no concomitant reduction in the existing workload, which was often considerable (pp. 179–182). To explain the reform failure more fully, and in order to help improve theoretical tools that could analyze similar situations in Asia or elsewhere, Cave makes use of neoinstitutional analysis (p. 177). This sociological paradigm helps us understand how long-established and widely accepted institutions, such as the Japanese junior high school, inevitably nurture rules, scripts and classifications that are taken for granted by those who work there. Teachers in these schools spend their