Page 7 - Japanese Growth and Education: 演講人：Motohisa Kaneko教授

Japan’s Development and Education - Past, Present and Future -c107

based on agriculture. Even though it is estimated that literacy rates were already

as high as seventy-percent among boys, the majority of children received
virtually no schooling. It is also important to recognize that the immediate
pecuniary return to education should have been minimal, or even negative,

considering that child labor was valuable in an agrarian economy. Moreover,
the Meiji government at this point had a very small tax base allowing for only
a small expenditure on primary schools. The burden of building and running

primary schools was mainly put on the shoulders of local communities.
Nonetheless, the ideal of primary education was accepted by the Japanese
to overcome the obstacles. Figure 1 above shows that gross enrollment rate in
4-year primary schools increased from the 30 percent level in the 1970s to 80

th
percent by the beginning of the 20 century, and then to almost 100 percent
th
level in the first decade of the 20 century. A gross enrollment is derived as the
ratio of enrolled students to the number of total school-age students. A gross
enrollment rate of 100 does not necessarily imply that all the children completed
primary education, it only stands for the ratio of enrolled students to those at
appropriate age bracket. In fact there was a significant amount of “wastage” of

students, who dropped out before graduation (Amano, 1997).

Phase 2

Japan’s education went into the new stage, which spanned from the

period of World War I until the period of World War II. This is the period when
universalization of primary education was achieved, while secondary, and then
higher education started initial stage of expansion. From the perspective of

economic development, this is the period when the modern sector of economy
took off. That included the manufacturing sector equipped with Western