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4. Between Education and Politics
- University of Hawai'i Press
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132 4 Between Education and Politics The language of learning tends to be apolitical and ahistorical , thus hiding the complex nexus of political and economic power and resources that lies behind a considerable amount of curriculum organization and selection . In brief, it is not an adequate linguistic tool for dealing with what must be a prior set of curriculum questions about some of the possible ideological roots of school knowledge. . . . These questions are not usually part of the language game of psychology. Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum For as writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction between author and public . . . begins . . . to disappear. For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer, that is, a describer, but also a prescriber. As an expert—even if not on a subject but only on the post he occupies—he gains access to authorship. Work itself has its turn to speak. And the account it gives of itself is a part of the competence needed to perform it. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” The foregoing examination of the Journal of the Tokyo Meikei Society identified some of the possibilities and the obstacles that educational journalism presented to both proponents and critics of developmental education. Unlike teaching manuals, the Journal depended on written contributions from Society members, making authors of its readers. It offered them a monthly forum to discuss their own interpretations of the doctrine and to participate in an ongoing critique of competing interpretations and of local programs to implement it. At the same time, the Society's own regulations limited the breadth and depth of their dialogue and indirectly hampered their ability to act on the ideas expressed in the Journal, whether proposals to replace the pouring-in method with developmental education or schemes to replace “pseudo-” with “true” developmental education. The provision that restricted membership in the Society Between Education and Politics 133 to graduates of the Tokyo Normal School unwittingly discouraged members from sharing meaningful dialogue with educators whose ideas might have been shaped by different professional training programs (or, conversely, their lack of any such training) and teaching experiences. Furthermore, the fact that their alma mater was directly under the administrative thumb of the Ministry of Education, which placed a premium on bureaucratic conformity, did much to undermine what proponents called the “spirit” (seishin) of developmental education. Society members found little room in which to apply creatively its oft-mentioned “principles,” whether in the political sphere (in educational as well as national politics)—which was officially proscribed—or in the area of pedagogy itself. Society regulations also stipulated the kind of articles that would be accepted for publication in the Journal. Any discussion of developmental education in that periodical had to take place within the context of Society transactions, news about its members, observations or suggestions concerning specific teaching methods, reports on local educational conditions, and other relatively innocuous educational matters. These circumstances raise the question of whether a different kind of educational periodical could transcend these discursive limits. This chapter will attempt to answer that question through an analysis of the magazine Educational Review (Kyòiku jiron). At first glance, the Educational Review may appear to be a poor choice to contrast with the Journal of the Tokyo Meikei Society, given that the key personnel on the staff of the Review were affiliated with the Tokyo Normal School and thus were members of the Tokyo Meikei Society. Tsuji Keiji, who founded the Educational Review's parent company, the Kaihatsusha, was an 1877 graduate of the Tokyo Normal School. Tanaka Tòsaku, who graduated from the school in 1879, served concurrently as president of the Kaihatsusha and chief editor of the Journal of the Tokyo Meikei Society. Okamura Masatar ò, the first editor of the Educational Review, belonged to the school's 1875 graduating class. And the names of some of the Review's occasional contributors are familiar from the pages of the Journal of the Tokyo Meikei Society, notably Yumoto Takehiko, Yamagata Teisaburò, Ikoma Kyòto, and Kuroda Teiji. Furthermore, Tsuji and Okamura, having graduated from the school before the arrival of Isawa and Takamine, were nominal members of that group Takamine dubbed the “old graduates” (hidebound, complacent practitioners who typically lacked a thorough grounding in [3.237.24.82] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:51 GMT) 134 Between Education and Politics developmental education). Tanaka, likewise, was a borderline case, having graduated barely two months after Takamine...