教育問題への教育社会学の「社会」貢献の軌跡(<特集>教育臨床の社会学)  [in Japanese] A Historical Review of the "Social" Contribution of the Sociology of Education to Educational Problems(<Special Issue>Clinical Educational Sociology)  [in Japanese]

In considering the issue of "the contribution of the sociology of education to dealing with educational problems, " the author evaluates various research outcomes from the perspective of how they help to meet the practical demands of society for the clarification and management of educational problems, rather than from the traditional perspective of their contributions to scholarly developments. The products of the sociologists of education belonging to the Japan Society of Educational Sociology, therefore, are analyzed within the following frame of reference : (1) the social conditions under which the educational problems are raised, and the social needs to be responded to, (2) researches conducted by sociologists of education and their consequences in social context, and (3) the evaluation and positioning of these researchers from the standpoint of educational administrators. Adopting an overview of the "social" contribution of the sociology of education, the author finds that there are two periods in Japan's postwar history when researchers attempted to deal with the problems of education in remarkable ways. Both of these movements were initiated by the mass media. The first was the proposal for educational pathology, as advocated by leading educational sociologists such as Shigeo Kono, Sachiko Kikuchi, and Michiya Shimbori, at time, from the latter half of the 1960s, when many problems of education, such as the overemphasis on intellectual development, testing, cram schools, dropouts, and youth delinquency, arose in the context of the excessive focus on preparation for entrance examinations. Bullying and school refusal (the recent term in Japan is "school nonattendance") both emerged as social issues in the middle of the 1980s, when the media reported on several cases of children committing suicide after suffering from bullying at school, and when it was reported on television that bullying sometimes is a cause of school refusal. Some sociologists of education, such as Youji Morita and Mitsuru Taki, endeavored to investigate the actual condition of those problems and to clarify the background of the phenomena, utilizing questionnaire research. After demonstrating the results of their researches, Morita and Taki had been given opportunities and funds from the Japanese Ministry of Education to continue their research, and they have contributed to proposals and the formulation of the educational policies as members of government advisory committees.