Private Academies of Chinese Learning in Meiji Japan: The Decline ...

CONCLUSION 245would be monitored by the core school. Most funding would goto invidviduals rather than institutions, and students would havefar more choice in putting together flexible programmes. In earlyMeiji there were elements reminiscent of such a pattern, butthings were far less organized; there were the mainstreamschools, which did not offer or did not offer enough of certainsubjects or courses at secondary level, and there was a variety ofjuku and other small educational institutions filling the gap inprovision. Students put together their own educationalprogramme, attending different schools and juku as they (or theirparents, if they were younger) saw fit. This “patchwork quilt”education reflected a transitional period marked by a lack ofeffective organization and discrepancies between policy andreality, supply and demand. Once the general situation changed,educational careers became more uniform.In drawing attention to (superficial) similarities between MeijiJapan and present-day concepts of education, my intention is notto claim that the juku was “modern” (it was not), nor to call for areturn to the juku. As this study has shown, the links madebetween the juku as it existed from the Edo into the Meiji periodand the ideas formulated in response to the educationalchallenges of a later age are tenuous. Nevertheless, study of thejuku in Meiji Japan reminds us that the public, state-controllededucation system we take for granted, and the idea that we mustprogress steadily through a graded system of schools until wehave graduated and “finished” our education, are as much aproduct of certain historical circumstances as was the juku. Thissystem and the assumptions it reflects must therefore be open tochallenge.NOTES1 See Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities andSocietyin England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Inthe context of education, “classicizing” seems to offer a betterconcept for comparison than “orientalizing” (Stefan Tanaka,Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts intoHistory, Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1993). The transformationof kangaku was accelerated by the import of Western academicdisciplines and their methods, but the widening of what wasstudied and the development of the kōshōgaku school of textualcriticism in the late Tokugawa period suggest, that Western