Since its establishment in 2003, the Japan Council on the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD-J) has paid close attention to informal learning processes in community-based efforts to promote local sustainable development. ESD-J carried out two projects to collect information on and visualise community-based ESD practice: the…

Traces the histories of rural education and rural technology in four countries. Suggests that the economic function of education is the transmission of technologically relevant skills, and that technologically appropriate curricula are a necessary part of economic development policy. 30 references. (SV)

This case study of Wakayama Prefecture focuses on the postwar Japanese government's efforts to facilitate administration of rural areas via "town-making." School consolidation is among the means used to fabricate a new sense of social cohesion from a patchwork of depopulated and aging villages. The goal is to promote a national modern…