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Success by Failure

Education Reform in Japan: A Case of Immobiltst Politics is a book that should be read by anyone interested in Japanese education, because it presents a great deal of information about the campaigns Japanese conservatives waged in the late 1960s and in the 1980s to reform their nation's school system. Unfortunately, the analysis offered in this book is deeply flawed because its author, Leonard James Schoppa, fails to grasp the relation between these campaigns and the ones successfully waged from the early 1950s through the mid-1960s to undermine the democratic approach to schooling introduced by American reformers after World War II. As a consequence, Schoppa misconstrues the true aims of the reform campaigns of the late 1960s and 1980s and wrongly concludes that they were largely unsuccessful. Furthermore, because he fails to seriously examine the charge raised by progressive educators that the reforms of the early post-Occupation years resurrected many of the authoritarian practices and nationalistic values that dominated Japan's schools throughout the prewar era, Schoppa uncritically endorses the highly questionable proposition that democratic education is alive and well in present-day Japan. Before identifying the most serious errors in Schoppa's analysis of the conservative camp's "failed" attempts to reform Japan's public school system, it is important to note that, since his work is not a "study of educational policies" but one "which treats education reform as a case study in Japanese policy-making," it is less interested in "the quality of the results" than it is in "the way those results were produced." Likewise, it should be pointed out, Schoppa (an assistant professor in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Government and For-