State Formation and the Development of the National Education System : The cases of Japan and England and Wales

In his analysis of the history of national education systems, Andy Green pointed out that the most important factor in the establishment of the national education system was the process of state formation rather than economic development, even though he noticed the importance of the latter. He analysed historically the relationship between state formation and the national education systems of Asian countries like Japan, focused on the concept of "the developmental state" and upon the important role played by the national education system in the process of state formation. In this paper, attention is paid to the conflict between state formation and economic development. I would like to point out that the developing process of the national education system was neither simple nor progressive. It was, rather, a zigzag process with very serious discontinuities in its idea and contents. A major discontinuity occurred at the turn of the century. This was caused by the contradiction and conflict between the request from the Government to strengthen the role of State to extend the mode of capitalist production system, and the process of gaining consensus from the people. There were parallel discontinuities in both countries at this sort of stage, even though those two systems were very different in culture and organization