A look at school in Japan (part 2): power relations

Claude Lévi Alvarès, Professor Emeritus, Hiroshima University
"Powers in the school in Japan"

The relationship between national directives and local practices is never transparent. Educational actors, and teachers in particular, are not content to mechanically transmit public policies, but neither do they have unconditional autonomy.
In the 1980s, subjection relationships between schools and supervisory administrations formed a complex, stratified and non-uniform system on a national scale: the Ministry, departmental and municipal education committees, superintendents, mayors, headteachers and deputies, teachers who were still strongly unionized, as well as parents, each intervened according to their own logic, producing local "arrangements" endowed with real specificity.
Forty-five years on, these players' room for maneuver seems to have changed. Their narrowing is frequently evoked, but it is important to question the exact nature of these evolutions: real reduction, recomposition, displacement, diversification of modes of exercising power?
It is this questioning - and particularly what it implies for teachers' professional autonomy - that will form the core of our reflection.

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