学校教育と戦後日本の社会意識の民主化  [in Japanese] School Education and Democratization of Social Consciousness in Post-war Japan  [in Japanese]

This empirical study discusses the democratization of social consciousness in post-war Japan and the function of school education in this process. For the measurement of democratic consciousness, we use the scale of authoritarian conservatism, which has been used in many previous studies in this field. It is a well-known fact that educational career and age have effects on authoritarian conservatism. Besides, the more complex relationship between school education and authoritarian conservatism has already been confirmed, namely two opposite aspects of school education, which reduce authoritarian conservatism and form it according to the educational conditions in school. Reasoning from these facts, it can be presumed that the relationship between age and authoritarian conservatism just represents the qualitative difference of school education between generations. Making a comparison between the old system and the new one, we can properly evaluate the function of school education to democratize social consciousness in post-war Japan. We use the data of the 1985 Social Stratification and Social Mobility Survey (SSM) and conjecture the effects of school education. After dividing all samples into three groups, the first group being people educated only under the old system, the second, under both systems, and the third, only under the new system, we apply the same multiple regression model to each group. The independent variables analyzed are educational career, occupational prestige score, and age, and authoritarian conservatism score is a dependent variable. The result indicates that 1) the relationship between age and authoritarian conservatism is caused by the difference in educational systems. Especially, age has little direct effect on the democratization of social consciousness in post-war generations. 2) The magnitude of the democratizing function of the post-war educationl system is about 1.8 times as large as the pre-war one. 3) The function of democratization of social consciousness by school education has been maintained for 25 years in post-war Japan.