Japanese Government Policies in Education, Science, Sports and Culture 2000[Trends in Educational Reform Section 2 Q5 What will be done specifically from now?]

New courses of study will be implemented from FY2002 in elementary and lower secondary schools, and from FY2003 in upper secondary schools. Specifically,

{1} Computers and the Internet will be used actively in each subject as well as in the Period of Integrated Study; and {2} The lower secondary school industrial arts and home economics course, "Information and Computers," and the newly established upper secondary school course, "Information," will be made compulsory.

In addition, measures carried out up to now will be further advanced, focusing on the Millennium Project. Specifically, this includes:

We will continue to aim at access for all schools by FY2001. In addition, in order to comprehensively examine the state of progress of education informatization in FY2002, we will hold festivals utilizing the Internet.

We will promote the development of intra-school LAN functions of public elementary and lower and upper secondary schools by the target year of FY2004.

We will facilitate computer installation and Internet access at private schools toward the establishment of standards comparable to those of public schools by the target year of FY2004.

In order to enable all of the roughly 900,000 public school teachers to acquire the ability to use computers by FY2001, we are implementing the Teacher Information Literacy Improvement Project, which has been supporting training carried out by prefectures since FY2000, to our existing training.

We are promoting the computerization and preparation of databases of educational materials for school use that are owned by education centers in each region and working to have them provided and distributed over networks. In addition, we are computerizing the pre-existing learning sources in numerous places in society (museums, libraries, research institutes, universities, companies, etc.) and developing an efficient system to provide them to schools over networks with the aim to disseminate its way of operation throughout Japan.

Development of functions of the National Center for Education Information

From FY2000 we have been carrying out research on portal sites 4 (bases for the transmission of information) in order to promote education informatization from a nationwide point of view, and plan to open such a site by the target year of FY2005. This site will link all kinds of educational databases and enable searches for useful information and otherwise provide comprehensive access to information.

4. Portal site: The first page a user sees when accessing the Internet

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