Education And Literacy During The Tokugawa Period

At the beginning of the Tokugawa period in the 17th century, education and literacy were not prominent in everyday life. Mainly the aristocracy, Buddhist priests, and the upper reaches of the warrior class had access to private tutors. Even then, however, very few of these classes, especially the samurai, were literate. Many shoguns at the time did not care about the importance of education in society. The Samurai did not need to know how to read in order to fight off enemies, therefor it was not necessarily important to learn. For many Shoguns, it was more important to maintain peace throughout the empire than to have an intellectual military. It was not until the middle of the 18th century that education started to become important in daily
life. Even then, education efforts began with attention only to the Samurai. By 1750, there were forty Domain, or Han schools that restricted entrance only to the sons of the ruling class. Most of the school leadership was in the hand of Confucian scholars who taught students to read texts that were made in China. These texts were a poor mixture of Chinese and Japanese writing and were not very stimulating as the main goals of these schools were more focused on military training than on actual education. Han schools typically remained the same throughout the Tokugawa era with little growth in numbers unlike the commoner schools which grew rapidly in the 268 years and laid the foundation for the Meiji Restoration.