The Future of Education

Abstract:

Educational reform in Japan has advanced across multiple domains, including curriculum reform, teacher professional development, ICT integration, staff allocation, and improvements in school infrastructure. However, these policy domains have often been addressed independently, limiting a structural understanding of how educational systems evolve over time. This study examines the longitudinal evolution of Japan’s educational condition development policies by applying probabilistic topic modeling to national education policy documents. The analysis focuses on sections related to elementary and secondary education in the First to Fourth Basic Plans for the Promotion of Education. Japanese-language policy texts were preprocessed using morphological analysis with the udpipe (japanese-gsd) model, followed by Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with Collapsed Gibbs Sampling. After noise reduction and lemmatization, a refined vocabulary of 1,080 terms was analyzed, and four latent policy topics were identified based on interpretability and analytical coherence. The results reveal four stable policy domains: (1) school infrastructure and learning environment development, (2) teacher professional development and instructional support, (3) ICT utilization and information education, and (4) staff allocation and operational improvement. Analysis of average topic distributions across policy periods demonstrates clear temporal shifts in policy priorities. Early policy phases emphasized physical infrastructure and safety, followed by a focus on staff allocation and operational reform. Subsequent periods highlighted teacher professional development, while the most recent plans show a marked increase in ICT utilization alongside sustained attention to human resources. These findings indicate a cumulative and layered trajectory of educational condition development rather than a sequence of isolated reforms. By providing an integrated, longitudinal analysis of education policy using text-mining techniques, this study contributes a robust methodological framework for understanding systemic educational reform and digital transformation in international comparative contexts.

Keywords:  Educational Condition Development, Education Policy Analysis, Text Mining, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), ICT Integration

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