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Chapter 9: Rural Resistance to Modern Education: The Japanese Peasant, 1873–1876
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160 9 Rural Resistance to Modern Education The Japanese Peasant, 1873–1876 When the First National Plan for Education, designed to serve every Japanese child of elementary school age, became official in 1873, 80 percent of the population consisted of peasant farmers. Many lived in isolated rural communities in mountainous areas where every member of the family was brought into the rice growing process at planting and harvesting time. Young children were not exempt. For a typical farmer, there was no need for their offspring to learn to read, write, and calculate in a full-time formal school in order to plant and harvest rice. What children learned informally at home was sufficient to meet the needs for survival of a typical peasant family in Japan in the early 1870s. With the implementation of the Gakusei from April 1873, the venerable village terakoya schools were officially closed, to be replaced by western-type schools mandated by the central government. The demise of the terakoya was particularly painful to peasant families as grassroots institutions that grew out of the needs of rural communities and, in turn, responded to local conditions. Parents sent their children to the schools voluntarily on the basis of their ability to pay, their own level of education and interest, and the expectations of the value gained by participating in them. The terakoya were consequently closely related to rural values. For example, they catered to boys, reflecting the longstanding tradition of girls being brought up for motherhood, best learned in the home. Second, terakoya primarily taught reading and writing sufficient for the student to get along in the local community. In some the abacus was also taught, rounding out the three R’s. Finally, the terakoya schools reflected local financial conditions and cultural patterns. They charged modest fees adjusted to the local economy in order to attract enough students to support the teacher who had no official credentials to teach. Since terakoya were all private, low fees as well as the fundamental goals of the school steeped in cultural traditions of morality served as attractive features to village parents. Their sudden closure in 1873 by edict from far-off Tokyo predictably provoked anger and frustration throughout the countryside.1 If ever there was a school that uniquely reflected Dr. David Murray’s profound thought in his reply to Mori Arinori in Washington in 1872 that brought him to Japan a year later, it was the Japanese terakoya village school of premodern Japan: “There are traditional customs which it would be unwise to subvert. There are institutions already founded which are revered for their local and national associations, which without material change may be the best elements of a new system. . . . If, Rural Resistance to Modern Education 161 therefore, changes are to be made in the educational system of any country, wisdom would suggest the retention, so far as possible, of those institutions already in existence.”2 The modern Japanese public elementary school under the Gakusei was specifically intended to replace the terakoya, with its unstructured curriculum and untrained teachers, by a modern national curriculum taught by trained certified teachers. Ironically, the process violated the very essence of Murray’s earlier advice. By closing down the neighborhood terakoya school, replacing it with a local public elementary school mechanically assigned to a population of 600, the old village and town patterns were often ignored. Many school districts did not conform to the arbitrary boundaries where 600 people lived. If a village fell considerably short of the magic number, it was combined with another to conform to the regulations. In drawing up the new elementary school districts, not only were unfamiliar combinations of villages cobbled together but the elementary school district did not always conform to other administrative civil units that had evolved naturally on the basis of local village borders. The new elementary school districts in some areas were effectively isolated from the traditional unit of local organization.3 There was an ulterior motive behind the separation of local elementary school districts from traditional village boundaries. Progressives within the government were highly critical of social patterns that had evolved within rural communities, considered the very core of the feudalism they were dedicated to eradicate. To avoid the influence of those feudal customs that bound the villagers in hierarchical relationships, the government implemented the new school districts and purposely ignored traditional social units. It was all part of the modernization process employing education as an instrument to reconstruct local Japanese society...