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)

The third workshop on the preparation of materials for the newly-literate in Asia and the Pacific was designed to train participants in the development, production (including design and illustration), distribution, and utilization of neoliteracy materials focusing on the improvement of rural living and the role of women in rural areas. Workshop…

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…

Unique economic, social, and cultural conditions explain why Japan, as one of the leading industrialized nations, has no organization which specializes in or is concerned with development education. Contributing factors are: (1) economic success is so recent (late 1960's) that people are involved internally enjoying hard won affluence; (2)…