Chapter 4. Toward Career Guidance as Guidance for Life
When they reach their third year of lower secondary school, students are required to determine their career paths. People must make many career decisions during their lives, but this decision in the third year of lower secondary school gives students their first opportunity to make an important decision for themselves about a matter that will influence their approach to life. Students approach this task with considerable trepidation. Naturally, parents are profoundly anxious about their children's future, and the decision is also a source of great concern for teachers, who are eager to ensure that their students will be able to pursue the career paths of their choice. Students at the lower secondary school level are still very young and have little experience of life. Career guidance provided at this stage can thus have an extremely significant impact on them.
The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture has worked with boards of education and schools to implement various measures to improve career guidance. Career guidance came to the fore as a key educational issue in 1992 as a result of problems with commercially produced tests. In this chapter, we will examine the background to the problems that occurred in 1992, as well as the current state of career guidance in lower secondary schools and the basic thinking on this issue.
