Symposium: Rethinking of an educational value system aiming for the sustainable development of rural areas in Japan

This symposium aims to consider the new value of education out of regret that the conventional shape of education has brought about economic development in Japan, but has failed to build a sustainable society. At schools in rural areas, the stronger the effort they make to develop students’ academic performance and to improve their career plans, the more they flow out to other cities. Hilly and mountainous rural areas constitute 70% of the Japan’s total land area, which have supported the development of urban areas by supplying food, energy, and human resources. How to maintain such rural areas has become an important issue in the today’s Japanese society. Therefore, we discuss a new way of school education, especially career education, and a new relationship between school and learning group in rural areas in this symposium, based on research conducted in a rural area.   
The first speaker Mr. Hida will consider the transition of high school education in a rural area from the phase of population and high economic growth to another phase of dwindling population and low economic growth in Japan by the use of survey data from the standpoint of sociology of education.
The second speaker Ms. Oki will discuss an impact on local learning groups made by high-school educational practices, and a regional mechanism, which have supported successful high-school educational practices through a perspective of community education.
The third speaker Ms. Terasaki will report on action research performed in collaboration with a high school in a rural area and a university in an urban area and discuss career education in school in terms of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Through the whole symposium, we question the traditional way of Japanese/East Asian meritocracy as typified by academic achievement and academic hierarchy, and insist on the importance of seeking the way of community-based education system that values the meaning of learning and the importance of nurturing people who actively contribute to society.