Education in Tokugawa Japan

Education in Tokugawa Japan by R. P. Dore offers the first comprehensive English-language account of how a society often remembered for its rigid hierarchy laid the foundations of modern Japan’s remarkably high levels of literacy and learning. Drawing on fief records, school regulations, curricula, and popular texts, Dore reconstructs the educational institutions of the Tokugawa period—from the elite fief schools training samurai to the terakoya that brought reading, writing, and arithmetic...