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CHAPTER 5 EDUCATIONAL REFORMS IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES AND THE FUTURE EDUCATION IN JAPAN
3 Future Education in Japan
(6) Increase of Expenditure for Education


As noted, the firm application of a number of policies, such as expansion of upper secondary and higher education, improvement of educational contents and enrichment of other conditions or education is required for true future development of education in Japan. Increases in educational expenditures are also essential.

The recent growth of educational expenditure in our country is not always satisfactory, as indicated by the following: the growth of the percentage of the national income spent tar education is slower in comparison with that of other major countries; the difference between other countries and Japan in educational expenditure per student is sometimes larger than in national income per capita. It is strongly required to make further efforts to increase the educational expenditure.

The scale of educational expenditure in future can be estimated in various ways according to a variety of view-points or basic factors, but attention should be paid to the basic relation between the educational expenditure and national income. So, it is generally considered desirable to estimate educational expenditure in relation to the growth of national income. In this regard, the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) has tried to project future educational expenses on the assumption that the amount expended for teachers' salaries increases in proportion to the growth of the national income, increase in the number of teachers is based on the pupil-teacher ratio, and other educational expenditures maintain a constant ratio to expenditures for teachers' salaries. Applying this method, the total amount of educational expenditure in 1968, private and public would equal 7.9 per cent of the national income, as compared with 6.8% in 1962. Recently, in other major countries, the percentage which educational expenditures were of national income tended to increase gradually. Application to Japan of the percentages reported for the United Kingdom and the German Federal Republic yields estimates of total expenditures for public and private education in Japan in 1968 equal to 8.6 per cent and 8.3.per cent of the national income, respectively. On this basing it is suggested that educational expenditure in Japan in the future should be at least 8 percent of the national income.

Another problem requiring study is that of the proper distribution of the educational expenditure. With regard to the growth of expenditures at different levels of education in Japan (elementary, secondary and higher education) it has been pointed out that the growth rate of the educational expenditure at the level of higher education is less than that of the number of students. Besides, considering the need of manpower provision at this level and the increasing promotion of academic studies, more educational expenditure should be allocated to higher education from now on. As a recent phenomenon, regional and social migration has been increased on a nation-wide scale, and the social and regional intermingling of the man-power demand and supply has been accelerated. This means that the influence of education is nation-wide, and education is not merely the function and responsibility of a local government. Under these circumstances, a current problem is that there are great differences in the extent of educational opportunities, types of educational conditions and learning ability, etc., among the various regions. As such differences are attributable to a great extent to differences of financial resources in each region, national efforts for coordination of imbalances of financial resources among the various regions should be made in terms of the educational expenditure. In addition there are various problems on education arising from economic conditions of families and individual differences of conditions such as physical and mental handicaps of pupils. To meet these problems, it must be borne in mind that financial measures should be taken for such purposes as the promotion of school attendance, provision of educational aids, and development of education for handicapped children.


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