A Sociology of Alternative Education

One of the outstanding phenomena of Japanese education in the last fewdecades has been the increasing number of children with a psychologicalhatred toward attending school. These “school-refusers” have rapidlyincreased in number, coming to exceed 130, 000 in the 1990s.In order to resolve this newly emerging problem, the government hasimplemented a number of educational reforms at various levels. Howeverthese efforts based on “operationalism” have not brought the problemsettled.The present authors believe that it will be impossible to find asolution without regarding the phenomena not as a burden to the existingsystems of our society, but rather as a mirror image of modern society.Therefore, our attention should be directed not to discovering the causesof “school-refusing” and to shifting the responsibility onto their mentaldefects, but to creating “public spheres” in pluralistic educational systems.This paper, which focuses upon various forms of alternative learningfor “school-refusers” in Japan, endeavors to depict the whole picture ofJapanese alternative education. First, it begins by reviewing the strengthsand weaknesses of some thoughts on “publicness” by several thinkers suchas H. Arendt, J. Habermas, N. Fraser, R. Sennett. Second, the authorsattempt to give a picture of the present situation of alternative educationin Japan with quantitative and qualitative analysis from the findings ofa questionnaire survey conducted in 1999. Third, in order to take anobjective view of the existing educational system, the paper describessome trends in alternative education and supporting systems in countriesas the United States, Denmark, Republic of Korea and Thailand. It isindispensable to examine these actual movements in and outside thecountry and search for possibilities for creating our own “public spheres.” In conclusion, the paper attempts to discuss some portions of the “message” we receive from these alternative practices, and finally the authors stressthe importance of taking a self-reflective attitude towards the creation of “public spheres.”