Roadblocks on the Information Highway: The IT Revolution in Japanese Education

(Paperback)

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Although Japanese universities have relied greatly on information technology to resolve numerous problems, their high expectations are undermined by the lags in implementing that technology. This edited volume argues that lags in IT implementation in Japanese education are created by contradictory and challenging responses of the social environment. If this dialectic can be visualized as having hands, the right would be avidly promoting IT, while the left hand is simultaneously blocking it. The result, of course, is an impasse. The issues central to this stalemate are significant because they point beyond IT implementation and schools, to a broader set of problem areas in Japanese society.

Reviews

Since Japan has promoted IT more intensively than almost any other country, and is itself a leading producer, it is telling that actual implementation has been slow. Jane Bachnik and her colleagues find the reasons not just in bureaucracy and individual intransigence, but in deeper social contradictions. The analyses in this book not only inform our understanding of IT and of Japanese society, but illuminate the relationship between culture and the pressure for practical change in any context. -- Craig Calhoun, Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University, USA
Don't be fooled by the title of this book. Although its theme is Japanese education, it is in fact much more: a far-reaching and critical analysis of the central "tensions"and "paradoxes" facing contemporary Japantechnology versus culture and social structure, plan versus implementation and results, individual versus organization and state, etc. Read this important book to understand the "roadblocks," both intentioned and unintentioned, that can impede social, political, and economic reform in Japan. -- Glen S. Fukushima, President & CEO, Cadence Design Systems, Japan; Former President, American Chamber of Commerce in Japan; Former Director for

Author Bio

Jane M. Bachnik is Professor of Anthropology at the National Institute of Multimedia Education in Chiba, Japan.