School, Community, and State Integration in Nineteenth Century Japan

290 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998.The remaining three chapters of this dissertation focus on the consolidation of the Meiji education system. This was a hegemonic endeavor, in which the Meiji government sought, through rhetoric, institutions, laws, rituals, and administrative routines, to marginalize pre-Meiji educational arrangements and to establish its own conception of school as dominant and commonsensical. However, informed by the memory of those pre-Meiji educational experiences, villagers from all socio-economic strata of local society contested the Meiji government's policies and, more broadly, its definition of school. This contest occasionally took the form of open conflict, but more often it manifested itself in more mundane, often passive techniques by which people resisted and negotiated government policies. In turn, this resistance most often resulted not in suppression but in compromise on the part of central and prefectural governments, resulting in policy solutions that were often quite far from the original intents of central policymakers. As a result, through this dynamic of resistance, negotiation, and compromise, local practices and expectations influenced the development of the modern Japanese state.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD