Educated to Participate: Interaction and Imagination in Three Alternative High schools in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how people desire better educational experiences in contemporary Japan to understand the way individuals perceive social problems and possible solutions. I conducted ethnographic research in three alternative high schools to examine how choosing non-mainstream schools enables some individuals to seek what they imagine to be a better way of learning. In Japan, secondary education, with its rigorous academic curricula and authoritative school behavioral norms, is the most crucial for one's future. However, a minority of secondary schools do not cater to dominant social values and diverge in noticeable ways. My target schools show various ways to be alternative, refusing to prepare students for the college entrance examination, and instead emphasizing the concept of "freedom," teaching the Korean language as mandatory, or conducting significant parts of education online. I consider students who attend alternative schools as education minorities. Given the outsized importance of secondary education in contemporary Japan, choosing these alternative schools potentially risk being marginalized in society. The fact that such students do not share the mainstream Japanese school culture might harm their transition to work. Although it is students who experience alternative education, parents guide their children's educational choices, especially those who enroll for alternative education from junior high school. As for those who enter the school from high school, the combination of students' decisions and parents' guidance show more complicated intersectionalities. Those from junior high school tend to be the more central figures of the school culture. Even if alternative schools attempt to refuse traditional mainstream educational pedagogies, each school establishes its own cultural ideology. While students enjoy greater freedom than in a mainstream school, they need to adjust themselves to the school environment. I argue that Japanese alternative education is better characterized by its close, non-authoritative relationships, rather than the uniqueness of its curricula. People in these schools imagine a better education in terms of participation—how students could build close-knit communities and in-depth interactions with others for their personal development and self-realization. Students and teachers spend most of their time talking and thinking about interpersonal relationships, rather than where their education takes them in the future. Based on my findings, I argue that people regard participation as the most crucial learning factor. In the alternative education movement, human interactions, whether being mediated by technologies or not, matter more than the curriculum itself. These schools teach and facilitate the communication required for such relationships in diverse settings. They also create and maintain the school as a safe space for many, if not all, students. Alternative education in Japan is characterized by people's desire for close relationships in a safe space.