A Comparative Study of the Impact of General Education Curricula Reform on Universities between the US and Japan

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The aim of this study is to examine the structure of general education curricula in Japanese universities and the US universities. The following findings are obtained.(1) Undergraduate curricula in the US universities are composed of three parts : general education, major, and electives. In them, general education is assumed as the core part of undergraduate education because of its historical tradition as liberal education. Majors are the late comer but have predominant position.(2) The ideas of general education are breadth and coherence. It has been almost impossible to be compatible between breadth and coherence in general education because of distribution requirement and department system. In spite of this, the curriculum reforms in the US have been conducted to seek the compatibility of these two ideas.(3) General education has been positioned in the first stage of university education so a part of it has been exchanged by remedial education. This situation recently becomes a big burden of general education.(4) The tradition of liberal education has caused cultural wars in universities. This shows what has been assumed as high culture in the US.(5) The notion of liberal education is seen in the difference between BA and BS as the type of undergraduate degrees. Even though the same programs of study for instance computer science, the BA is likely to focus on wide range of study requirement and the BS is likely to focus on engineering field of study.During the two years, four papers has been published in scholarly journals and one book which is translation has been published.