A Deliberation-Based Approach to School Citizenship Education in Japan : Theory and Practice

In many democracies, citizenship education has received close attention as an effective tool for improving the practices of democracy, and school education including elementary, secondary, and higher education has been expected to play a vital role in citizenship education. In theoretical terms, one of the key elements of citizenship education is “deliberation." Given that deliberation entails preference transformation, a deliberation-based approach to citizenship education needs to be inextricably linked with moral education. The recent reform of school moral education in Japan, in which moral education has been treated as a special subject at elementary and junior high schools from 2018 and 2019, respectively, aims to stimulate “thinking and discussing" by students. This goal of moral education can be seen to be in line with a deliberation-based approach to citizenship education, but its achievement requires more than just moral education; also needed is the alignment of moral education and other educational activities at schools. One such activity is “Tokkatsu"(Special Activities), which is particular to educational content in Japan. Whereas moral education is likely to focus on theoretical knowledge of diverse and conflicting values, Tokkatsu stresses the experience of applying such knowledge to actual situations. This paper regards Tokkatsu as key to deliberation-based citizenship education in Japan, and scrutinizes how Tokkatsu could/should work to develop citizenship in contemporary society. To be more specific, theory-practice gaps are illuminated through theoretically considering the contemporary significance of deliberation-based citizenship education and Tokkatsu, and describing the curricula of Japan's citizenship education. In order to develop this question, the paper takes a close look at the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic to the democratic policy process and deliberation-based citizenship education. This paper begins by exploring the expertise and surveillance that have had significant influences on anti-COVID-19 policy processes. Furthermore, by marshalling the arguments of preceding literature, some impacts of the resort to expertise and surveillance on the democratic policy process are revealed. Next, theoretical research is conducted into what citizenship is required of citizens to democratically deal with the pandemic: namely global and digital citizenship. If one expects citizenship education to emphasize these new conceptions of citizenship, then, how can Tokkatsu contribute to such citizenship education? Addressing this question, thorough attention is devoted to the potential and limitations of Tokkatsu in Japan's citizenship education. This paper concludes by suggesting that a variety of types of knowledge are needed to design citizenship education curricula stressing experiential learning, in which global issues such as those caused by the pandemic are dealt with.