Ryoko Tsuneyoshi, Kanako Kusanagi and Fumiko Takahashi
August, 2016
Abstract
There has been a growing interest in the whole child education in Japanese schools, particularly in school cleaning from the countries in the Middle East and Asia. This working paper explains how noncognitive activity, such as school cleaning, is placed within the official curriculum, which is the very important factor, enabling to link the activity to other non-cognitive activities within tokkatsu (tokubetsu katsudo: the period which covers noncognitive activities in the Japanese curriculum), as well as cognitive subjects. As school cleaning is situated as one of the educational activities, it has the diverse educational functions from developing interpersonal relationships to career education, in short, whole child development, thus it is understood not just the act of cleaning, but a form of learning.
