(9)Financial Aid to Private Schools

Private schools were heavily concentrated in the large cities and consequently suffered severe damage during the war. The financial plight of private schools was so serious by the end of the war that they would have been unable to function without the emergency loans made by the Ministry of Education to cover the reconstruction of physical facilities and basic operating costs. Moreover, the Ministry arranged for former military facilities to be converted for use by the private schools and many prefectural governments provided additional grants and subsidies.

Despite this assistance from the government, inadequate financing continued to plague private universities for many years. The Private School Promotion Association Law was promulgated on March 27, 1952, in an attempt to place public financial aid to private schools on a more permanent footing and the Private School Promotion Association was established on that day' as a channel through which the government invested money on behalf of the private schools. Even this proved an inadequate means in the long run to solve the financial problems of the private schools.

The postwar educational reforms also enforced changes upon the structures of the private schools so as 1) to standardize the educational content of private schools with that of national and local public schools; 2) to open their doors to a wider cross section of the public student body; and 3) to guarantee their administrative independence. One of the fundamental tenets of the School Education Law had been the establishment of parity among national, local public, and private schools. The Private School Law was promulgated on December 15, 1949, and put in force on March 15, 1950, making provisions concerning the extent to which governmental education authorities could regulate the affairs of private universities and other private schools. To accommodate the unique requirements for establishing and overseeing the activities of individual private schools, a special legal entity called the school juristic person was created. The Law also elaborated on the provisions relating to the appropriation of public subsidies to private schools in relation to Article 89 of the Constitution of Japan, which prohibited the expense or appropriation of "public money or other property" to "any educational enterprises not under the control of public authority." For the most part, the adherence of each private school to the principle that even private schools should make their education available to a broad public spectrum was left to the discretion of each school's administration. In general, the private school system of the postwar period was substantially altered by the Private School Law.

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