Five Years of the Plenary Training Session for English Teachers and the Evolution of English-Education-Related Know-how Market

"Welcome to XXX's world!" With this, my plenary training session week started. A ten-day plenary training session under "A Strategic Plan to Cultivate 'Japanese with English Abilities'" (SPC-JEA) formulated by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) started in the school year 2003, and all the English teachers working in high schools were supposed to take it once within 5 years by the school year 2007. It means this year is the last year for the project.
I happened to take the first 5-day part of the session in the first year, 2003, as a part of another voluntary session, and am taking that of the last year, 2007. As an organizer, who is the successor to the one who organized the first session, of this year's session proclaimed, its lecturers have improved both in quality and in quantity. What has made that happen within these 5 years? Is that because organizers have gained significant experience? Or does that have something to do with the longer-span social changes?
The separation of the education from the family or community transforms the education itself into an industry, into a commodity-producing or service-providing branch of economy. Some members of a community specialize themselves in teaching. The process of specialization also manifests itself in education. The specialization separates the diverse varieties of the manufacture of products or services from each other in the educational industry, and creates an ever-growing number of branches of the educational industry, for example, textbook publishers, teaching material makers, test makers, etc. It also creates specialized educational districts and systems of teaching, and gives rise to exchange not only between the products or services of the educational industry and those of the other industries, but also between the various products or services of the educational industry itself. This specialization of commercial or capitalist education manifests itself in all capitalist countries, and even in the international division of labour. This is true of post-World-War-II Japan, especially of today's Japan, as well, as we see in detail below.
A group of naive romantic teachers have argued that the post-World-War-II education, which they believe to be democratic, however bureaucratic it actually is, is characterized by the labour principle and the principle of even distribution of educational authority among the educational community members, namely teachers. This argument belongs entirely to the sphere of communalistic prejudices. The relation between bureaucratic education and individual evaluation expresses a conflict between two principles, the communal and the individual. The naive romantists accuse realists of the evil intention of introducing capitalism into education, and carefully avoid the reality which reveals the prevalence of capitalist relations even in public schools today.
The categorical assertion has been bluntly made in the Japanese educational community that there is no social division of labour in education. The naive romantic education theory of the "forcibility" of capitalism and commercialism in education could only have been evolved by rejecting, or proclaiming the very foundation of all commodity economy, namely, the social division of labour, as "forcible (artificial)." The theory is therefore based on the naive romantic prejudices dating back to the pre-modern, that is to say feudalism, society.
The people concerned in education in which commodity economy was poorly developed or not developed at all were almost exclusively teachers. This, however, must not be understood as meaning that the people, the teachers then, were engaged solely in teaching. It only means that the people engaged in teaching also processed the teaching materials, and that the exchange of products and services and the division of labour hardly existed.
The prestige of patriarchal teachers, who formerly conducted a mainly natural education, has declined significantly. The decline is, ironically enough, quite compatible with an increase in the amount of money under their control, for the more such teachers are ruined, the more they are compelled to resort to the purchase of teaching materials and services in the market. The conversion of teachers into wage-workers presumes that they have lost the means of education --- teaching materials, curriculums, evaluation, workshop, etc. --- that is, that they are "impoverished," "ruined." The small teachers who have lost their prestige in the education of developing commodity economy and capitalism have, in a sense, become ruined. That means the creation and not the shrinkage of the educational market.
The "freeing" of one section of the teachers from the means of education necessarily presumes the passage of the latter into other hands, their conversion into capital, and presumes, consequently, that the new owners of these means of education produce the products or services which are productively consumed as commodities by teachers now, but which were formerly produced by teachers themselves. That expands the educational market further.
The basic process of the formation of an education-related market, that is of the development of education-related commodity production and of education-related capitalism, is the social division of labour in education. This consists of various forms of processing teaching materials and teaching services, and of various operations in this processing. The operations have separated from teaching one after another, and have become independent branches of education-related industry. Education-related producers exchange their products and services, now commodities, for the education-related budget and for the family education-related expenses. Thus, education itself becomes industry, which produces commodities, and the same process of specialization takes place in it.
The specialization in education implies not only the horizontal one but also the vertical one. What might be a sound method to group teachers vertically? According to working hours? According to the goal and its accomplishment? According to the contribution for the team? According to the number of papers? In capitalist education the basis for the formation of a education-related market is the process of the disintegration of the teachers into educational entrepreneurs and labourers.
The "education-related know-how market" grows as a result of the specialization. Pieces of know-how are converted into commodities which are commercially produced and productively consumed. The production gives birth to entrepreneur educators, on the one hand, who produce pieces of know-how which sell. And, on the other, it gives birth to labouring educators who productively consume the pieces of know-how. In other words, teaching population is divided into well-to-do teachers with a commodity of the know-how and ill-to-do teachers with a commodity of the labour-power.
Here we finally reached the reason why the lecturers of the plenary training session have grown in quality and in quantity. They are, or at least have been, the well-to-do teachers. They have become prosperous because of the evolution of the education-related know-how market. Not a week passes these days without getting an invitation to a lecture or a workshop for English teachers. Some lecturers are showing their own "world" to inspire ill-to-do teachers. Some colleges are organizing workshops to preach their new methods, or to show off their rich equipments, to high school English teachers, maybe in part as a part of their publicity. The lectures and workshops are flourishing, and they are financed privately either with the fees paid by individual teachers or with the budget of colleges.
The growth of the market has been also supported by a kind of Keynesian power, the formulation of SPC-JEA, or, straightforwardly speaking, by a certain part of the budget of MEXT.
Two questions arise here: one is whether the market will survive even after the end of A Strategic Plan to Cultivate "Japanese with English Abilities", and the other is what consequence will come later. The answer to the first question depends whether the division between the well-to-do and the ill-to-do has followed the line between well-trained teachers and badly-trained teachers. The answer to the second depends both what the first answer is like and whether other powers are at work in the market. Let's see what will happen if the market power leads the educational community.
How have a certain group of teachers become well-trained? Labour hours used to concentrate to a couple of groups of teachers. They used to work longer than others. The concentration of labour hours means the concentration of experience. The groups of longer-workday teachers became well-trained with the longer labour hours, with more experience, and were naturally best provided with allocated pieces of teaching know-how. They have also concentrated in their hands the bulk of the purchased and the rented pieces of know-how. The more well-trained the teachers become, the more they rent pieces of know-how, despite the fact that they are better provided with allocated know-how, and some of them turn into small know-how owners, would-be well-to-do teachers.
It is quite natural that the well-to-do teachers also employ teaching techniques much above the average. That gives them a certain cultural hegemony which enables them to enjoy their influence over larger size of teaching staff, more plentiful supply of teaching materials, available financial resources, etc. That is to say, the well-to-do teachers do their planning faster, make better use of favorable condition, give the lessons to more well-prepared students, and report their achievement in proper time, place and occasion.
It is also natural that the expenditure of working hours on the production of any educational activity diminishes per unit of product as the size of the team increases. The cultural hegemony well-to-do teachers enjoy over other ill-to-do teachers will help sophisticate their methods over other methods planned by the latter teachers.
The well-to-do teachers used to work longer than others. Though they still work harder, what concentrate in the hands of the well-to-do teachers now is Intellectual Property. Intellectual Property here is education-related knowledge, pieces of teaching know-how, or know-who on the informative people. Knowledge itself is the result of the know-who on the past intellectuals. That is, the concentration of know-who is essential to be a well-to-do teacher.
As the result of their rich networking with other similarly minded teachers, or for the purpose of their rich networking with those teachers, the well-to-do teachers tend to do something in addition to teaching students. When the well-to-do teachers combine educational or teaching occupations and those of education-related industries on a large scale, a combination of the two systems of classification is necessary, that is, of classification according to the scale and type of teaching, and of classification according to the scale and type of education-related industries.
Commodity production will penetrate into education further, and consequently, the competition among the educators will be keener. The competition is the struggle for pieces of educational know-how and for educational independence. The significance of the way rentable know-how is grabbed by the rich teachers will change. The concentration of know-how renting in the hands of the well-to-do teachers, its industrial character, its connection with know-how leasing by the bottom group of the teachers will also change. The struggle for pieces of educational know-how leads to the ousting of the middle and poor teachers by the teacher bourgeoisie. This law will surely be manifested more vigorously.