EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM & PRACTICE IN JAPAN

20	“V Classroom Management and Guidance”	Previous	Next	JAPANESE

	Since the Meiji era, ‘increases in educational enrollment and advancement rates’ in Japan have served as important indices to demonstrating the development of public education. After World War II, enrollment rates reached almost 100% in 9-year compulsory educational facilities. While increasing advancement rates to universities followed the rapid increases in advancement rates to upper secondary schools from 1950 to 1970, students who cannot and/or don’t want to go to school are appearing today. This symptom of dropout children has come to be viewed as remarkable and has been termed a ‘school phobia’. It is commonly viewed as a kind of disorder in which children of school age personally don’t like attending school. More recently this phenomenon has begun to be called ‘tohkoh-kyohi,’ which means children themselves refuse to go to school. And now it is termed ‘non-attendance at school,’ or absenteeism, which has a more general meaning that acknowledges the fact that children don’t go to school for various reasons.( Non-attendance /II-47~48)