High School for All in East Asia

In the presentation, we try to answer five main overarching questions that are at the heart of this volume: How did East Asia achieve High-School-For-All?; How can we understand all of this theoretically?; What are the positive and negative dimensions of this?; Was this the source of its strong economic growth?; What is the future going to be? Through this discussion, we show merits and demerits of the East Asian development history with the expansion of upper secondary education.

In this presentation, I present a comparative sociological analysis of the historical formation of universalized upper secondary education and study societies facing declining birth rates after expanding education in East Asia. We are carrying out comparative research in East Asia with 12 members. Our project deals with upper secondary level education. Our project deals with Japan, South Korea, Mainland China (China, hereafter), Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam.

In this presentation, we mainly show the results of the historical expansion process and depopulating stage of upper secondary education in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.