A nation at risk crosses the pacific: transnational borrowing of the U.S. crisis discourse in the debate on education reform in Japan.

Autor/in	Takayama, Keita
Titel	A nation at risk crosses the pacific: transnational borrowing of the U.S. crisis discourse in the debate on education reform in Japan.
Quelle	In: Comparative education review, 51 (2007) 4, S. 423-446Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Link als defekt meldenVerfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	online; gedruckt; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0010-4086; 1545-701X
DOI	10.1086/520864
Schlagwörter	Vergleich; Gesellschaft; Bildungspolitik; Bildungsreform; Diskurs; Krise; Kritik; Theorie; Asien; Japan; USA
Abstract	In striking contrast to the international acclaim during the 1990s for Japanese schools' instructional excellence and solid curricular contents, the Japanese media, scholars, politicians, and the public continued to perceive their country's schooling as steeped in a dire crisis, afflicted with such "educational problems" as bullying, school absenteeism, violence, and, most recently, "classroom collapse," or teachers' loss of control (Tsuneyoshi 2004). The sense of crisis was further intensified after the 1998 announcement of the 2002 revision to the national curriculum standards. ... There are three notable aspects to the recent crisis discourse in Japanese education. First, it is highly questionable whether the current state of Japanese education is deserving of such a sensationalist label. Japanese scholars who were dubious of the crisis claim pointed to its highly ideological nature and to the lack of reliable longitudinal data to measure long-term scholastic trends. These voices of skepticism, however, have been muffled in the highly charged atmosphere sparked by the crisis rhetoric. Second, as witnessed in many other nations (see, e.g., Berliner and Biddle 1995; Gorard 2001; Steiner-Khamsi 2003), the crisis was constructed through the reductive interpretation and selective appropriation of international league tables, namely, PISA and TIMSS (Takayama, forthcoming). Third, conservative critics of yutori reform exacerbated the crisis atmosphere by borrowing the crisis discourse popularized in the United States in the wake of the 1983 landmark report, A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). They compared the current state of Japanese education under the 2002 yutori reform to the alleged crisis experienced by American education at that time and argued that solutions could be derived from America's "successful" school reform since 1983. This article focuses on this third characteristic of the recent crisis discourse in Japanese education, drawing upon the culturalist approach to educational borrowing advanced by Jürgen Schriewer and Gita Steiner-Khamsi as the central analytical framework and combining this with social constructionist theories that define crisis as an ideological construct. (DIPF/Orig.).
Erfasst von	DIPF \| Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsforschung und Bildungsinformation, Frankfurt am Main
Update	2009/2