（11）The Promotion of Social Education

Social education during the immediate prewar and wartime years primarily served ideological purposes rather than fulfilled genuine adult educational needs. All of the important documents related to postwar educational reform, stressed the need to develop social education, and to promote community educational services. In April, 1948, the Education Reform Committee, in the proposal on the policy of promoting social education, called for immediate legislation to institute programs in these areas. The Social Education Law was promulgated on June 10, 1949, and put in force on that day, followed by the promulgation of the Library Law on April 30, 1950, and of the Museum Law on December 1 1951.

Social education in postwar Japan has been strongly oriented toward training citizens for useful participation in a democratic society. In the schools this function was served by the new social studies subject, but for the broader citizenry, particularly in light of the convention of universal adult suffrage, citizens' public halls became the basis for social education. The novel idea of citizens' public halls was advocated by the Ministry of Education in the notice of July, 1946, and nearly half of the content of the Social Education Law is related in one way or another to their development. The halls began to open in 1946 and their activities were enthusiastically received by the populace.

Other activities in the sphere of social education were the promotion of women's education as represented by the development of local women's associations, the offering of correspondence courses on social education, the opening of school buildings to the public, social education by means of audio-visual aids, the activities of parent-teacher associations (P.T.A.s or PTAs), and the initiation of various adult education courses. The P.T.A.s played a particularly important role as fund-raisers for the schools at a time when school education was inadequately financed. Since the original provision of Article 13 of the Social Education Law, which was drafted as a literal application of Article 89 of the Constitution of Japan, prohibited national and local governments from subsidizing private organizations devoted to social education, the vitality of many programs fluctuated with the fortunes of each organization.