学級と官僚制の呪縛  [in Japanese] The School Class and the Restriction of the Bureaucratic Principle  [in Japanese]

When contemporary schools which are controlled by legal authority are compared with schools which were controlled by the traditional and the charismatic authority in former times, it becomes clear that the modern school is systematically arranged in many respects such as people, space, time, and teaching materials. This arrangement of every element in school shows that the school organization is a very artificial and bureaucratic equipment to teach many children. In particular the school class is the most important part of the educational bureaucracy to promote effective teaching and a world which is sorted out and purified. At one and the same time, the same teaching contents are transmitted by the same teacher to students of the same age range in the same room. Each student's abilities become visible to all others. In this classroom situation, the students are obliged to compete not only in terms of ability, but also for winning honour and approbation from the teacher. This is one kind of zero-sum game which divides them into winners and losers of honour and approbation from the teacher. This game, on the one hand, tends to tie the able student to the school class, but, on the other hand, makes the loser unpleasant and makes them tend to be alienated from the school class. To avoid this alienation, teachers have to devleop some degree of cohesion among students in the classroom. Although this strong cohesion has some degree of success with these defeated students, sometimes it fails. When this cohesion is too strong, it often functions ironically as a removal power to some students on account of abnormal attitudes and inappropriate appearances and brings about bullying in the classroom.