Growing Regional Gaps in Compulsory Education in Japan: A Case Study at an Aging Rural Area

Since the 1990s, mainly in advanced countries, policy makers have been paying increased attention to new forms of school systems that work in partnership with local communities, as the closed nature of the public education system has faced criticism in the context of “neo-liberalism”. Within these global contexts, the Japanese government began prompting a new system of community-based schools named the School Management Council System in 2004. This school council system is extremely different from the existing public school system in that the citizens’ participation into school management is definitely institutionalized.

    In contrast, in recent Japan, the advent of an aging society combined with a low birthrate has had a serious impact on the whole public education system, making it more important to consider educational policies from the aspect of population problems. Especially, in aging rural areas, the number of abolished schools is rapidly increasing due to depopulation, and there are heated debates on the regional gap in educational opportunities between urban areas and rural areas. Thus, one of the most urgent problems in rural Japan is to design new forms of community-based school systems appropriate to the realities of local residents around the schools in the population-declining areas.

    Accordingly, this paper examines, from the perspective of sociology, the problems and the possibilities of community-based school systems by focusing on the collaboration between compulsory schools and the local residents in Japanese aging rural areas, in order to search for the new public education forms open to the local residents.