Systematization of post-compulsory education for the working youth : Japanese Experiences

This article aims to review and analyze the historical development of post-compulsory education for the working youth in Japan. In 1872 Japan launched establishing a modern education system modeled on Western countries. In 1886 the government officially announced the introduction of the 3-4 year of compulsory education at the ordinary elementary school. In 1907 the length of compulsory schooling was extended by two years and the six-year compulsory education system became almost fully established. In the meantime, some educators took an increasing interest in post-compulsory education for a large number of youths who did not go on to the secondary schools. In 1893 the Minister of Education Inoue Kowashi issued the Regulations on Vocational Supplementary Schools and encouraged municipalities to establish such a school. It aimed to give simultaneously a supplementary primary education and a low-level vocational education for the working youth. It was planned to be low-cost institution that would make efficient use of the teachers and facilities of the neighboring elementary schools and adopted a flexible part-time instruction. In the first two decades in the 20th century, the vocational supplementary schools, especially those focusing on agricultural education increased rapidly. In 1920 the regulation was revised and the standard and quality of education were considerably improved. Also the number of the female students gradually increased. On the other hand, in 1926 Japanese Army established their own Youth Training Center with the object of giving a preparatory military training for the young adolescents. The activities and functions of the vocational supplementary schools and those of youth training centers overlapped each other and often confused the situation. Finally in 1935, under the initiative of the Army, the two institutions were integrated and Youth School were organized anew. In the youth schools, male students were required of taking seven year supplementary education in total and fi ve year course for female students

Conflict over Education in Postwar Okinawa under the American Rule (1945-1972)

This paper aims to describe the struggle and conflict over education in postwar Okinawa under the American rule (1945-1972). After the Second World War, for a long time Okinawa was ruled over by U.S. military government. In the meanwhile, the sovereignty over education in Okinawa was restricted. Rehabilitation of the education facilities destroyed by fierce battles and reorientation of the education in Okinawa was largely entrusted to the care of the military authority. The occupation authorities presumed that Okinawan people as an ethnic minority in Japan and they have been treated with contempt and exploited by Japanese. Their occupation policy showed a notable tendency toward separating Okinawa from mainland Japan and cultivating its own identity among Okinawan people. Education policy reflected this trend. However, in the face of the education policies, occasionally took place conflict and friction between the military government and educators in Okinawa. For example, there was controversy over the issues such as editing of new textbooks, teaching language and English education, establishment of Ryukyu University, fund-raising for rehabilitation of school buildings, enactment of education laws, educational aids from Japanese government and the antecedent partial returning of the competence of educational administration. Educators in Okinawa took the initiative in the movement against the military rule. They had a strong desire that the education in Okinawa to be identical with Japanese education. In the early stage of the occupation, the idea of adapting English as the teaching language and introduction of English education in the elementary school was frustrated. In 1958, with great pains Okinawa achieved the enactment of its own education laws in the legislature that replaced the Ryukyu Education Code imposed by the military government. From the 1950s on, Japanese government gradually expanded the scope of the educational cooperation to Okinawa

What were the Underlying Factors that enabled the Rapid Development of Education in Modern Japan?

Japan had almost established a self-sufficient and full-fledged national system of education by 1920 or in about fifty years from the introduction of modern education on the basis of models taken over from Western countries. It was an unparalleled undertaking in the world. What factors made it possible for modern education to develop so rapidly within a short space of time? Here I think through again this fundamental question. The following factors would be especially noteworthy. (1) cultural and educational legacy of the pre-modern Edo era, (2) secular tradition of education and escaping from confl ict between religion and education, (3) linguistic uniformity in education, (4) no experience of any colonial system of education and the possibility of choosing from a wide diversity of foreign models, (5) fi rm belief on the idea of nation-building and national unity through education, (6) early emergence of the academic-credential society, and (7) consequences of the two external wars for education. Japan was fortunate enough to be blessed with socio-cultural environmental factors that were favorable for the development of education. There was a growing consensus among political leaders of Meiji restoration on the pressing need of forming modern nation-state and national unity through a nation-wide “common” education. In the early period of the nation-building, the advent of the academiccredential society in which employment and social status of people were decided mainly on the basis of a person’s educational attainment had been laid. Such system of linking educational credentials with personal promotion aroused an education fever among ambitious young persons. At last, the early experience of two external wars brought a deeper understanding among Japanese people on the meaning and importance of the national education. The rapid development of Japanese education would has been achieved in a rather unique condition that was missing in most of the developing countries in the world

Fast Data-driven Greedy Sensor Selection for Ridge Regression

We propose a data-driven sensor-selection algorithm for accurate estimation of the target variables from the selected measurements. The target variables are assumed to be estimated by a ridge-regression estimator which is trained based on the data. The proposed algorithm greedily selects sensors for minimization of the cost function of the estimator. Sensor selection which prevents the overfitting of the resulting estimator can be realized by setting a positive regularization parameter. The greedy solution is computed in quite a short time by using some recurrent relations that we derive. Furthermore, we show that sensor selection can be accelerated by dimensionality reduction of the target variables without large deterioration of the estimation performance. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified for two real-world datasets. The first dataset is a dataset of sea surface temperature for sensor selection for reconstructing large data, and the second is a dataset of surface pressure distribution and yaw angle of a ground vehicle for sensor selection for estimation. The experiments reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms some data-drive selection algorithms including the orthogonal matching pursuit

Engineering the substrate specificity of toluene degrading enzyme XylM using biosensor XylS and machine learning

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Off-Policy Evaluation of Ranking Policies under Diverse User Behavior

Ranking interfaces are everywhere in online platforms. There is thus an ever growing interest in their Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE), aiming towards an accurate performance evaluation of ranking policies using logged data. A de-facto approach for OPE is Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS), which provides an unbiased and consistent value estimate. However, it becomes extremely inaccurate in the ranking setup due to its high variance under large action spaces. To deal with this problem, previous studies assume either independent or cascade user behavior, resulting in some ranking versions of IPS. While these estimators are somewhat effective in reducing the variance, all existing estimators apply a single universal assumption to every user, causing excessive bias and variance. Therefore, this work explores a far more general formulation where user behavior is diverse and can vary depending on the user context. We show that the resulting estimator, which we call Adaptive IPS (AIPS), can be unbiased under any complex user behavior. Moreover, AIPS achieves the minimum variance among all unbiased estimators based on IPS. We further develop a procedure to identify the appropriate user behavior model to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) of AIPS in a data-driven fashion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the empirical accuracy improvement can be significant, enabling effective OPE of ranking systems even under diverse user behavior.Comment: KDD2023 Research trac