Moral Education in the Japanese Tertiary Sector: Focusing on the Teaching of Morality and Business Studies

A survey of moral education in the Japanese tertiary sector today reveals a shared conviction among a great number of professors that their institutions fail to provide students with moral guidance or offer courses where discussions of ethics or morality are central. Given that moral and ethical education is not especially common in the tertiary sector in our country, our universities can appear to be remarkably amoral institutions. Today, however, we find ourselves at a major turning point in moral education generally. It has not been a school subject since World War II, but in 2016 the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology decided that it will be “special subject†in the next national curriculum; so new moral education classes will start in elementary schools in the 2018-2019 school year, and in junior high schools in the 2019-2020 school year. This initiative has, however, created unease among teachers in charge of moral education, in part at least because they feel unprepared to implement it. They are looking for help here to Japanese universities, but these have neither academic departments nor courses solely devoted to scholarship or instruction in the area of moral studies. The narrow, if important, problem of teacher training offers us a good opportunity to consider the place of moral education in the entire higher education sector. Obviously its role in Japan’s universities should not be restricted to preparing students wishing to become schoolteachers. It is equally vital for to those who require an appropriate understanding of morals when they join the business sector, which is already engaging with business ethics and CSR. We are working to respond to this need, and I will describe some of the initiatives in this field that we are now implementing at Reitaku University, notably in our teaching of morality and business studies.