Tokugawa Vs. Meiji Schools

For my final project, I decided to examine the shift in Japanese views toward education that began at the end of the Tokugawa Period and continued through the Meiji Restoration, coming to characterize many changes that were implemented during the Meiji Period. In his work, “Education in Tokugawa Japan, R. P. Dore argues that the goals of any system of education can be roughly put into three categories: personal vocational utility, societal utility and personal enrichment.[1] As we will come to see, Japan’s schools shifted emphasis all around these three categories in its quest for a westernized system of education. While it is clear to us now that Japan’s old system of moral education would not be able to compete in the industrial age that was dawning, people at the time were not so convinced. Thus we will see the two Japans that formed around the divisive issue of education reform during the Meiji Restoration illustrated.