Beyond the pros and cons of the current introduction of Morals to compulsory education

Morals was made an official subject for elementary schools from April 2018, and it will also become one for junior high schools in 2019. This is in part a response to the still ongoing bullying problem, and while there are hopes for moral education, there are also many areas for concern.

On the other hand, there are also concerns. Above all, it is thought that for moral education to be effective it will depend greatly on the capabilities of each individual teacher in the classroom. Three particular requisites were set forth when Morals was made an official subject by the MEXT. The first was the adoption of authorized textbooks, which I would like to talk about later. The second was the introduction of evaluations. Usually, a subject’s evaluation results are expressed in an objective numerical value on a report card, but this shall not be applied for moral education, and instead there will be a recorded written assessment. That is hoped to be a more positive evaluation in the form of a continuous summation, and the MEXT has presented points for evaluation in a number of forms, but it is rather abstract and it has to be said that some parts don’t seem to be relevant. It is thought that this is causing confusion among teachers in schools, who are wondering in what way they should proceed with evaluating morals, or whether we can evaluate morals in the first place. In addition, the third point that has been stressed is that no special subject certificate has been prepared for Morals. Currently, the class teacher basically teaches one Morals class for one period a week. Students who are aiming to become elementary or junior high school teachers have been required to take lessons related to moral education, but I think for many teachers already in school they will have to take the opportunities provided through teacher training or the periodic renewal courses of teaching licenses to closely check once again what is additionally required of them. Originally it was thought that moral education should be taught in the everyday, general education activities of the school, such as homeroom, classes, school events and club activities. Integrating these together to teach it as a subject, will directly ask the teacher’s educational capabilities including an approach through trial and error.

Here, I’d like to touch upon the first point that I mentioned earlier, the adoption of authorized textbooks. Originally, after World War II a “time for ‘Moral education’” was first required to be a part of compulsory education in 1958, with the proviso that “it was not to be treated as a subject in the conventional sense.” At first, there was deep-seated criticism regarding its introduction, and the rate of implementation was less than sufficient. In 1965, the then Ministry of Education, Science and Culture put out a document of guidelines called “Reading materials for morals,” and from then on, the importance of supplementary reading teaching materials as resources to help emotional understanding was presented and highlighted. Although, as a matter of fact schools only ever really used the makeshift set of teaching materials that were traditionally called “Morals textbooks” as supplementary reading materials, and each school was able to use a variety of other teaching materials at their discretion. However, this time, due to Morals becoming an official subject, to begin with the use of the authorized textbooks has become extremely important. Whether lessons should involve a teacher simply conveying the items and contents of the “government curriculum guidelines” while taking into account the textbooks and teacher’s guides, or aiming for a lesson that stays at purely using the materials to raise questions and gets the children and students to think for themselves, will depend largely on the attitude of the teachers in the classroom. For example, as was recently shown on NHK’s “Close-up Gendai Plus” (broadcast on April 23, 2018), symbolic teaching materials such as the famous story “Hoshino’s two-base hit” (by Kinetaro Yoshida, published in 1947) that was noted in many authorized textbooks of moral education, have been the subject of a lot of attention. In a baseball match, a boy called Hoshino ignores his manager’s instruction to bunt and gets a two-base hit instead, which results in winning the match, but after the match he is admonished for not obeying his manager’s instructions and breaking the rules. This story suggests the importance of keeping rules, being a team player by not upsetting the team’s harmony, accepting criticism and reflecting deeply on your behavior, but it’s also apt to be interpreted as a student being dominated by an authoritarian coach’s instructions, and brings to mind a certain unhappy incident at a university’s American football team. Should the message of this story be conveyed to the children and students as important morally just as it is, or should the actions of Hoshino and the words of his manager be used as subjects to get the all the students to think, including about right and wrong, as the direction of the lesson will be totally different depending on which perspective is taken. By the way, the author of this story, Kinetaro Yoshida, was a liberal English literature scholar, who also taught at Meiji University as a professor of the department of literary criticism, and he was involved in founding the “Japanese Children Library (Nihon Shokokumin Bunko),” together with the renowned humanist, Yuzo Yamamoto and Genzaburo Yoshino. There is also research that points out that Yoshida’s own intention was always to think about “democratic attitudes” through the close examination of this work. In any case, when it comes to the interpretation of the contents of the teaching materials textbooks, there will surely be a need for teachers to think critically and rationally at all times about how closely it is adhering to the initial objective of moral education of “thinking about things in a multifaceted, diverse way from a broad outlook, based on the understanding of various ethical values”