Educating the working-class: Perceptions of the relevance of schooling among Japanese vocational high school students.

Many sociologists have argued that tracking students is detrimental to vocational students' attitudes toward school and may lead to resistance to schooling. Since Japanese vocational high school students are publicly represented as having low ability and are stigmatized in the Japanese mass culture, one would expect a high level of resistance to schooling among these students. However, recent research by Rosenbaum and Kariya (1989, 1991) provide evidence that Japanese vocational high school students have strong incentives to perform academically because good grades are linked to favorable blue-collar job placements. This dissertation was an attempt to examine Japanese vocational high school students' perceptions and experiences of schooling as relevant to future occupational roles. I sampled students at eight vocational and one academic high school in three widely separated regions in Japan. The point of this large sample was to introduce regional and school level sources of variation that might be important in understanding the school related attitudes of vocational high school students. Altogether I sampled 1,963 students in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades (#NSF-SES-9001024-Cole). Descriptive statistics and observations, as well as multivariate regression models provided the evidence evaluated in this dissertation. I examined how differences in family social capital and need for school in job placement contributed to perceptions that school is relevant among Japanese vocational high school students. The data provided support for a modified model of educational relevance that incorporates both the strength of family influence and school environment variables. Need for the vocational high school had a statistically significant effect on perceived educational relevance, but the magnitude of this effect was not as large as the family influence effect. The data also showed that perceptions of education as relevant has strong effects on other, more frequently researched dimensions of attitudes toward schooling such as anti-teacher feelings, satisfaction with and enjoyment of school.PhDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104399/1/9513494.pdfDescription of 9513494.pdf : Restricted to UM users only