Actualizing Moral Education in Japan’s Tertiary Sector: Reitaku University’s Response to Today’s Challenges

How do you impart moral education? This apparently simple question has long caused difficulties; many decades ago, “the distinguished Belgian jurist, the lamented M. de Laveleye” confounded Inazo Nitobe, the author of Bushido, the Soul of Japan, by springing it on him, as he ruefully acknowledged in the preface to that work in 1900. If the same question were to be put to institutions of higher education in Japan today, the initial reaction of almost all of them would probably mirror that of Nitobe about a century before; he could only admit that the question “stunned me at the time. I could give no ready answer.” The simple reason for this, he believed, was that the basic moral precepts that Japanese students ought to be required to learn were “not given in schools” (p. v).

But problems are also opportunities, which is why moral education in the Japanese tertiary sector today finds itself at a turning point. To appreciate why this is so, though, a brief outline of Japanese moral education as a whole is needed. This must inevitably focus mainly on what happens in elementary and junior high schools, for until very recently in Japan, moral education was provided exclusively to those between the ages of 6 and 15. It is only from the beginning of the current academic year, 2014, that moral education is to be extended to some, but by no means all, high schools. For example, in Chiba prefecture, where Reitaku University is located, “moral lessons” are to be become a requirement for first year students in all prefectural high schools, though this will still be a very exceptional case in Japan.

With elementary and junior high schools, the current foundations for moral education were laid down quite a long time ago. A report on “Educational Standards in Japan,” published as far back as November 1964 by the then Japanese Ministry of Education (today’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; MEXT), “legally” requires all Japanese elementary and junior high schools, both private and public, to observe the standards set forth in the report. In conjunction with this, the ministry also promulgated a Course of Study (Gakushu-shido-yoryo in Japanese) that established three categories as a framework around which curricula should be structured. The one that concerns us here is “moral education” (the other two being academic subjects and special studies).

According to this Course of Study, which was enshrined in national law, the purposes of moral education could be encapsulated in the following general principles:

These principles have been amplified over the years. In Chapter 1 (“Aims and Principles of Education”) of its Basic Act on Education (Act No. 120 of December 22, 2006), MEXT delineated with even greater clarity the meaning and role of moral education in Japanese formal school education, affirming that the first object of education is “to foster an attitude to acquire wide-ranging knowledge and culture, and to seek the truth, cultivate a rich sensibility and sense of morality, while developing a healthy body” (italics added). Then, in 2008, MEXT revised Chapter 3 (“Morals”) of the Course of Study to include a more detailed description of the goals of moral education; the key objective was the nurturing of students’ morality, including qualities such as moral sensitivity, judgment, and an attitude of practical eagerness that should inform all educational activities in schools. The chief thrust of these recent developments involves setting moral education in a much broader context than that envisaged in 1965 by relating it to all activities that make up school life. This accounts for the requirement that instruction geared towards moral development is not just the province of classes specifically set aside for “Moral Education.” Teaching in all academic and special subjects also needs to be able to show a close relationship between content in these areas and moral education. With the aim of supporting the effectiveness of the program of moral instruction, as far back as 1963 the Ministry of Education published its “Teachers’ Manual for Moral Instruction,” which it distributed throughout the country to guide teachers at each level in their preparations for moral education classes. More recently, MEXT has begun to provide free supplemental learning materials, called “Notebook of the Heart” (Kokoro no Noto in Japanese), to promote moral education. The present government, which came to power after the 2012 elections, is strengthening and developing this channel of moral education to ensure that it will be wider and deeper in scope in Japanese schools than ever before.

At the level of national laws and the official guidelines established by MEXT in its Course of Study, then, it is quite evident that moral education is considered to be the core educational activity in Japanese school education, and that “theoretically” and “legally” its status is superior to that of all other school subjects; indeed, it is defined not as a mere “subject,” but as a “domain” which is located in a sphere distinct from, and placed above, normal school subjects such as mathematics, the Japanese language and so on. To give practical expression to this concept, all schools dealing with students for whom education is compulsory are required to offer classes in moral education. It does indeed seem that the “domain” is expected to play a unique, pivotal role in school education. But reality and the ideal, it has to be said, remain very distant cousins; aspirations for moral education have yet to be embodied very effectively in the experience of those at school.

The fact of the matter is that, as Professor Yoshio Oshitani of the Graduate School at Showa Women’s University has pointed out, in terms of its place in the consciousness of teachers actually engaged in classroom practice, moral education is still likely to occupy a lower tier than any other subject, even though 55 years have passed since the classes for moral education were instituted in Japan (Oshitani & Yaginuma, 2013, p. 15). This, it seems to me, is one reason why a panel of independent experts set up by the MEXT proposed that the “classes for Moral Education” should be “substantially” elevated to the level of a proper subject to be taught in school curricula and be treated as a “special subject” from the 2016 school year onward. But why is there still such a great gap in Japan between the real and the ideal in moral education?

In a recent study of this topic, Shigeki Kaizuka pointed out that in Japanese education after World War II, moral education has been a source of constant conflict between those with differing political ideologies. Especially since the late 1950s, moral education has been strongly conditioned by the confrontational relationship between the Ministry of Education (now MEXT) and the Japanese Teachers Union, which has tended to criticize the subject in harsh terms as a tool used by those in power to subordinate Japanese people or to impose state-approved values on students. So in Japan, moral education remains a political football. The fierce struggle over it means that any new proposal is immediately viewed simply as part of “the schema of binary opposition” that pits advocates and opponents of moral education against one another. This effectively prevents any substantive discussion of the kind of moral education that is appropriate for schools, or of the best way to deliver it; it means that the subject tends not to be dealt with from an educational viewpoint, as belonging to the realm of pedagogy, but mainly in the context of politics (Oshitani & Yaginuma, pp. 3 3-34). This goes a long way to explaining why elementary and junior high schools do not always seem to achieve satisfactory results in tackling the various problems that belong to the province of moral education. Of course, schools do approach the subject in all seriousness and are well aware of the difficulties inherent in it. In its 1993 survey of the context in which moral education is implemented, for example, MEXT asked elementary and junior high schools the following question: “What do you think are the most important tasks which your school will tackle from now on in seeking the enrichment of the moral education it offers?” The most common answer was “to raise teachers’ awareness concerning moral education,” from which we can deduce that some teachers had not yet fully accepted moral education as one of their responsibilities, perhaps partly influenced by the prevalent denigration of government-created moral education. This is a sad fact, given that offering moral education can be one of the most rewarding and satisfying tasks for teachers, something they should feel inspired to take on and enjoy, principally on their own initiative.

Given this background at the primary and secondary levels, it is not difficult to understand the lack of enthusiasm that characterizes the attitude of Japanese universities to moral education, which is not even an officially required element of their curricula. As noted above, moral education has not been a school subject since World War II, so Japanese universities have neither academic departments nor courses solely devoted to scholarship or instruction in the area of moral studies. As a result, they have not to date produced sufficient researchers or educators specializing in the subject, so that courses on the “methods of teaching morals,” one of the required subjects for teacher-training programs, are sometimes offered by university staff who are not specialists in moral education. Such courses, which are supposed to provide students with a comprehensive grasp of the objects, contents and methods of moral education, attract just two credits for one 90-minute class per week for 15 weeks. This paucity of provision for moral education in teacher training programs in Japanese universities has naturally done considerable harm to the prospects of advancing the cause of moral education in elementary and junior high schools.

But our central concern here is not with the narrow, if important, problem of teacher training, but with the place of moral education in the entire higher education sector. The central issue here is the idea that universities have a civic responsibility to teach their students morality and ethics, and this idea has not infrequently met with skepticism, suspicion and, on occasion, outright rejection. It comes as no surprise to learn, therefore, that moral and ethical education is not especially common at university level in Japan. As noted above, this may be partly owing to the general belief among Japanese people that such concerns are the province of the home, and of the elementary and junior high school classes in which moral education is a requirement under MEXT’s official guidelines for teaching. Little regard is paid, though, to the effectiveness of what is done at home and in school in this matter.

However, the current indifference to the provision of moral education in Japanese universities cannot, it seems to me, survive in today’s world. Decades of globalization made a deep imprint on the 20th century academy. The result is that we can no longer continue to behave as we did in the past; our still young century demands that we reconstruct the paradigm of our knowledge and learning. One insistent challenge we face is to offer a new kind of learning that provides generic skills. The need for this has recently achieved widespread acknowledgment in Japanese higher education, to the point where the term “generic skills” (or “soft skills”) has today become a key concept of “cooperative education,” especially for those who seek a new role for the tertiary sector in the 21st century. In the case of Japan, I regret to say, this movement was not launched by universities themselves on their initiative, but by the country’s business elite, the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren). As early as 1989, this economic organization, which boasts 1,285 of the nation’s foremost companies among its members, started making educational proposals for the development of global human resources. This policy initiative, originating in business circles, was then appropriated by the Japanese government, which has made similar proposals through the Cabinet office, MEXT, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and other bodies. In 2010, for example, METI included the development of global human resources as one of its industrial policies. Introducing the concept of “Fundamental Competencies for Working Persons,” it sought to outline the basic and generic skills required for a person to work successfully with a variety of others in the work place or local society. The proposal emphasized abilities in three key areas: (1) action, where one needs the ability to step forward, to try to move in a positive direction even after failure; (2) thinking, that is, the ability to ask and answer meaningful and significant questions; and (3) teamwork, where the ability to cooperate with others as a member of a diversified group to achieve a goal is essential. It is obvious that the government, the business world and society at large share the conviction that education is the primary tool for society in the global age to renew itself. It follows, therefore, that our universities should lead the effort to improve society by developing global human resources as well as the generic competencies described above; these constitute one of the most important public policies as well as one of the primary educational goals of Japanese higher education today.

If we examine the content and characteristics of “Fundamental Competencies for Working Persons” in greater detail, it rapidly becomes obvious that moral education is indispensable for any development of these competencies. In fact, some of characteristics of these competencies and skills common to the proposals of both business corporations and government ministries seem to have particular relevance for the realm of higher education. In concrete terms, the first point to note is that these competencies include not only cognitive abilities but also ones that are holistic or essentially human in their totality, such as the requisite skills for effective personal relationships, as well as moral and ethical sensibilities. Secondly, they have a prominent place as educational objectives, being required elements for incorporation into university curricula, as well as functioning as important yardsticks by which people can evaluate universities as educational institutions.

One example of the abilities noted above is that which allows us to “take a step forward and try even after failure.” For this we may need the virtue of courage, which allows us to act in spite of our fears and to overcome our inner doubts and negativity, or we may need to make a drastic change in our moral or positive way of thinking, learning to regard “failure” not in pessimistic terms as a negative experience, but positively as something like “the grace of trial which improves us better.” Then again, in order to be able to cooperate with others, we will have to learn, more than anything else, how to overcome the problem of individual selfishness or self-centeredness, attitudes that have no place in teamwork activities. We need to understand that such positive behavior is a function of character, or of the dispositions that make up our moral personality and the culture that infuses our social environment. Without this insight, we will find it very difficult to develop these abilities solely through the traditional and academic curricula of universities which tend to overemphasize the “intellectual training” of students. What is most needed in higher education today is what we may call “character education,” or moral education that is practical in nature, which makes possible the nurturing of the moral integrity and good character in our students required for our present-day globalized society. Here we would do well to note the memorable words that Albert Einstein quoted in a letter November 20, 1950, from Dombey and Son (ch. XXIII) by Charles Dickens; “Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.” To ignore this truth and to end up maintaining the status quo in higher education will inevitably mean that any proposals we make, no matter how satisfying they may sound to the ear, will exist as words only and, in the worst circumstances, will never come anywhere near fruition or even grow perceptibly.

It is not, of course, especially easy to identify the nature or type of morality to which students should be exposed during the course of their higher education. In general, morality is taken to refer to the various codes of conduct created and followed by societies or some particular groups within them, or accepted by individuals as rules for their own behavior. Morality can, however, be acknowledged to possess a wider meaning, and to include “better relationships with others.” From this point of view, therefore, developing one’s morality may be said to involve understanding what kinds of mental attitudes and actions are necessary if we are to achieve better relationships with others. On this view, we do not have to restrict the learning of morality to any particular developmental stage, nor limit moral education only to elementary and junior high school levels. For relationships rearrange themselves every time our life stage and circumstances change, and on each occasion we need to open ourselves to new perspectives and prepare to live differently. This is why learning morality should not be seen as ending the moment one enters university or even upon graduation, for we must prepare constantly to deal with a changing world and times of unprecedented and rapid transitions.

When we refer to “others,” we include not only those close to us such as our children, other family members, intimate friends or important colleagues, but also local communities, our nation, other countries, all humankind and, beyond even that, all that exists on earth and in nature. If we take the example of our relationship with nature, we need to grasp how all the phenomena of nature are linked one to another. Scientific research has demonstrated that nature or the universe constitutes a unified system, and that human beings are only one of the many phenomena within it. Our concept of “others” should lead us to much wider horizons and deeper dimensions, and though space prevents us from commenting further on this important topic here, it is clear that we need a new kind of moral intelligence suitable for the 21st century in order to reconstruct the traditional system of knowledge of Japanese higher education.

At Reitaku, the foundation of our concept of morality is the scholarship and philosophy of the founder of our university, Chikuro Hiroike (1866–1938), a scholar and educator, who published in 1928 his Treatise on Moral Science: A First Attempt to Establish Moralogy as a New Science (a three-volume English translation of the Japanese original is also available under the title, Towards Supreme Morality: An Attempt to Establish the New Science of Moralogy) and his spirit and writings continue to play a central role in the concerns of our university. He was firmly of the belief that education should provide students not only with knowledge but also with a high level of integrity and moral character.

In order to develop and apply his moral philosophy and guiding spirit in the sphere of higher education, we have established two dedicated centers, R-bec (the Reitaku University Business Ethics and Compliance Research Center), and CMSE (the Center for Moral Science and Education). R-bec’s mission is to promote research into business ethics, compliance, and risk management, in continual search for a code of conduct that meets the needs both of individuals and of society as a whole. CMSE, on the other hand, aims to contribute on a broad front to the promotion of moral education in the university as well as in society by conducting education and research in Moralogy, the moral science that forms the spiritual foundation of our university. To act globally, it has now collaborative projects with academic institutions in the United States such as the Center for Character and Social Responsibility at the University of Boston and the Center for Character and Citizenship at the University of Missouri-St. Louis; these represent attempts to form bonds between east and west and thus create a bridge between continents. One of the fruits of these activities was the publication of Happiness and Virtue Beyond East and West: Toward a New Global Responsibility (Ryan et al., 2012), a volume of essays containing the collaborative efforts of members of the CMSE and the Center for Character and Social Responsibility to illuminate, from their individual perspectives, nine virtues that are indispensable for the realization of happiness; courage, justice, benevolence, gratitude, wisdom, reflection, respect, responsibility and temperance.

It has been said that the 21st century is the era of the “knowledge-based society,” wherein new knowledge, information, and technology assume ever greater significance in the fields of politics, economy, and culture. Is it enough for us to accept that the only task of higher education is to contribute to such a knowledge-based society by pursuing the maximization of knowledge? Inhabitants of advanced countries may enjoy a fairly affluent lifestyle in the material sense, as well as having access to ever increasing amounts of information, but the reality is that mental and spiritual anomie increases by the same measure. The mere enhancement of knowledge cannot deliver peace, security, and happiness to the people of the world; in truth it cannot truly serve society unless it is accompanied by a high level of morality. At Reitaku, therefore, it is felt that moral and ethical education should go hand in hand with the work of scholarship in higher education, and that it is the task of higher education to rebuild morality in today’s society while also reformulating areas of knowledge suitable for our new era.

Another important issue we have had to think about is what adjustments we need to make to harmonize the founding spirit of our institutions with the concept of school management. Reitaku University is fortunate here in that its founding ethos is closely connected with the idea of school management. Just as the tenets of our university accord with Dr. Hiroike’s philosophy of “the integration of knowledge and virtue,” so does his idea of management, “the integration of economics and morality,” help us, since it mandates that our school management must also be based upon morality.

In terms of management, of course, we differ in certain important respects from business companies that set concrete goals for themselves, like sales or profit targets, which are clearly inappropriate for us. We, by contrast, when considering school management, must focus our fundamental mission, on how we can offer high quality education to the students who are our stakeholders, and on the kind of support we can give to our students that will allow us to achieve clearly defined educational outcomes.

But this does not mean that we should not try to learn from the manner in which business corporations conduct themselves. They strive to ensure that principles such as compliance and corporate social responsibility govern their activities, and study diligently the way these principles affects their businesses in terms of accountability, trust and general soundness. The present age of globalization both allows and obliges us to pay regard to management strategies that have international currency. So when we at Reitaku came to consider the kind of internationally recognized standards on which we should base our school management, we decided to adopt ISO 26000 as our model, and took the initiative in this field by announcing our commitment to it.

ISO 26000 is designed for use not only by corporations, but also by various other types of organizations. In essence, it aims at encouraging them to practice social responsibility in order to realize the “sustainable development” of society. Our intention as a university in embracing ISO26000 was to accelerate the realization of our educational ideal, namely “to nurture people who, with both knowledge and virtue, will contribute to the development of society and the realization of the security, peace and happiness of mankind.”

Having made an institutional decision to adopt ISO 26000, we next attempted to construct a common platform and management system to implement it, and then, in March, 2011, issued a list of “Reitaku University ISO 26000 Management Commitments.” Since ISO 26000 attaches great importance to “performance”, we obviously had to pay special attention to this issue and so posed to ourselves the following five questions: (1) How do we grasp the issues we need to tackle as an organization?; (2) How do we prioritize these various issues?; (3) How do we measure the scale of what is involved in implementing the plan?; (4) How do we guarantee the credibility of our measurements in this regard?; (5) How do we continue to improve our performance?

The outcome of this process is that we are now tackling the following five “Reitaku Issues,” giving them priority over other matters: Reitaku Issue 1: to promote education centered on students and assist their growth; Reitaku Issue 2: to devote ourselves to services offered by university staff, centered on students; Reitaku Issue 3: to strive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; Reitaku Issue 4: to put sustained and strenuous efforts into the clean-up and preservation of the campus environment; Reitaku Issue 5: to realize ongoing contributions to our local communities.

As noted above, Reitaku University provides education according to the concept of integrating knowledge and morality based on its founding philosophy of Moralogy. At the core of this approach is “Moral Science” which is also the main subject for the general-education component in the undergraduate program that is compulsory for all students in their freshman year. This year-long Moral Science course consists of one 90 minute class per week for 30 weeks and includes an element of student assessment in the form of a questionnaire that appears in the table form below. It consists of two parts: (A) an overall assessment of the course; and (B), students’ comprehension of the course contents. In one assessment period, a total of 456 students who took this course responded to this questionnaire graded on a 5 level scale (5 being the highest and 1 the lowest). Though the average scores [4 out of the 5 in Table 1 and 5 out of 6 in Table 2)] may be said to have been relatively high, the outcomes of the university’s moral education program could not be measured by this questionnaire alone, since we also need to take into consideration the argument of Berkowitz and Bier pertaining to character education that “the outcomes of effective character education are a complex set of psychological characteristics that motivate and enable one to function as a moral agent” (2007, p. 30)

In addition to this, there are other morality-oriented classes such as “Reitaku Studies” (learning about the history and founding spirit of the university), “Reitaku Spirit and Career,” “Theory of Life-long Education,” “Studies of Moral Education,” “Modern Society and Moral Science,” and so on.

According to the classical Western pedagogies of Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, moral education has the following three aspects; logos, the province of critical ethical thinking; pathos, which is connected to our emotional make-up; and ethos, which involves relationships and moral empathy, and the connection between word and deed. Such a perspective suggests a solution to a current problem with our university curricula, for we often find that university programs in morality and ethics alone are not very effective in facilitating the advance of our students to a higher level of moral reasoning and development. If so, our curricula seem to be somewhat deficient in the social and behavioral approach that must be present if we are to spur the development of their moral competencies. Studies on how higher education facilitates the moral development of students can help us here. For example, James R. Rest argues that “the college effect cannot be attributed to moral education programs but must be attributed to something more pervasive in the college experience” (Rest, 1988, p. 189). Norma Haan defines that “experience” more precisely when contending that “what exactly develops in moral development” may not be “moral understanding” but “tolerance for conflict and the skills of conflict solution” (Haan, 1985, p. 1006), while Lawrence J. Walker points out that “social experiences are the better predictors of moral reasoning development” (Walker, 1986, p. 121). The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that facilitating moral development through practical and social learning (such as confrontation with experience and the needs of others) outside the classroom is often more important for our students than simply gaining a cognitive understanding of ethics inside it.

In order to improve in this area, we will have to offer students educational programs outside the classroom so as to let them engage with the moral issues of the real world. In the United States, especially in elementary and secondary education, experience-based programs are already being advocated by those who emphasize the educational role which volunteer activities and experiences based in the community can play in students’ moral education and development. In recent years, Japan universities have also been required to contribute to their local communities as Centers of Community, and, as a result of this, to incorporate more community-based activities and experiences into university curricula and learning programs for the students. In this sense, we feel the need to promote experience-based formats such as service learning in our university education, and to shed more light on the positive impact that service learning can have on the psychological development of our students. Strictly speaking, of course, in terms of its major educational outcomes, moral development is not exactly the same as the prosocial development expected from what is called service learning, for prosocial development does imply a broader set of social and life skills than moral development. But we can still make the argument that if moral education is an integral part of character education, moral development must also be an essential component of character development. Needless to say, this is not to argue that the cognitive element is unnecessary or unimportant. On the contrary, we most certainly do need academic reflection and discussion as well as the objective evaluation of the educational outcomes of service learning. Beyond that, though, our most important task in developing character education is to learn how to integrate the three factors of logos, pathos and ethos holistically, and to facilitate their active presence in the delivery of the curriculum.

Another important avenue of moral education is positive faculty-student interaction, which we will refer to below in connection with Dr. Hiroike’s idea of moralogical pedagogy. It is not too much to say that the success of moral education depends largely on how far university teachers and staff can be involved in student activities in addition to regular class room lectures. At Reitaku, we try to encourage and support our faculty and staff in promoting positive interactions with students in as broad and diverse a set of ways as possible, since we consider that such interactions relate directly to Reitaku Issue 1 (to promote education centered on students and assist their growth) mentioned above. In order to facilitate this, we have initiated various projects and activities that are intended to be potent influences on the moral growth and development of the students.

For example, when we create a textbook for moral education, we listen to student voices; in fact, the two textbooks for the course on “Moral Science” (which represent not only the first attempt in the tertiary sector to provide textbooks on morality but also on ethics and religious studies at university level), A Moral Textbook for University Students: How Do You Live Your Life and A Practical Moral Text for University Students: How Do You Think and How Do You Act, were devised through collaborative work with our students. It is usually the case that it is university teachers who write university textbooks, and when it comes to themes like “morality” in particular, textbooks tend to consist of one-directional, holier-than-thou preaching. These new Reitaku textbooks, however, have incorporated “student perspectives” as much as possible so that they do not become just another dogmatic books on morality.

In terms of other faculty/student interactions, we have the two representative programs whose educational premise is that learning in the university curricula is only a part of university education for students. One of these programs is the “Leader Seminar” for those students who are the heads of circles and club activities; the other is the “Unit Leader Seminar” for those who stay in our Global Dormitory as Unit Leaders. Our dormitory, which is not only a residence but also a locus for moral education, has a history and tradition going back more than 80 years to its establishment in 1935. The Global Dormitory, which was renewed in 2014 with half of its residents coming from abroad, is organized around a system of units, each of which consists of six students, like a family, with a Unit Leader. In both seminars, in which students, teachers, and staff participate, and in workshops, discussions and consultations, we emphasize the importance and responsibilities of leaders, and encourage them to share the common problems they come across, to look together for ways to deal with the disequilibrium caused by moral dilemmas and to deepen mutual understanding and respect. This is a practical form of education based on the notion that their moral development and growth may also exert a positive influence on other students around them.

According to the moral doctrine of Dr. Hiroike (2002, p. 513), what has been mentioned above relating to university curricula and extracurricular activities might be categorized as “small laws,” which “contain only part of the laws of the natural phenomena, being tangible, so to speak, and material and of temporary character,” in contrast to “the great law,” which “consisting in the eternity of the principle of nature is formless, so to speak, or spiritual, having an eternal character.” Dr. Hiroike explains how all this relates to the aim of “Moralogical education” as follows:

Dr. Hiroike does not use the word “God” here to refer to the beliefs of any particular religion but to something like the entity of the universe. When we apply his idea to the actual moral education, what seems to be most important aspect of moral education is his concept of methodology, the idea that education should be carried out by means of “the direct influence of human character.” The first president of our university, Chibusa Hiroike, declared that education is the supreme ideal of implanting the spirit of benevolence in the human mind, and that learning or higher education will radiate brilliance only by implanting this spirit of benevolence in contemporary science and knowledge and making use of them. In order to achieve this, educators themselves should embody the spirit of benevolence, an approach that coincides with the views of Marvin W. Berkowitz that “every teacher is a role model, whether s/he intends it, wants it, or not” and that “every teacher impacts students’ character through her or his own character every single day,” and of Tom Lickona who has said that “the single most powerful tool you have to impact a student’s character is your own character” (Streight, 2009, p. 13). In short, if educators or teachers wish to improve moral education in higher education, they themselves have to improve their own character in order to drive out all that is negative and nurture the spirit of benevolence among their students through their own good character and spirit of benevolence. That is etymologically the original and true meaning of the word “education,” though character building among faculty members is clearly one of the most difficult and challenging missions for higher education.

At present, our university is prioritizing the completion of two tasks that are essential if Reitaku’s founding spirit is to continue to do its work in the educational sphere. The first is curriculum reform, especially in the field of moral education, an area of endeavor where the promotion of cognitive development alone cannot guarantee that we will achieve our essential objective. So in addressing reform of the post-2016 curriculum, we plan to establish an entirely new syllabus for moral education covering all four years of the undergraduate degree course. This will involve creating a program that is both phased and multilayered, one that includes basic preparatory seminars for freshmen, a course on Moral Science with practical service learning for the second year, and courses imparting more specific knowledge of Moralogy in the third and fourth years. Our second goal is to bring to fruition a project to develop a measure to assess the impact of Moralogy and moral education at Reitaku, an undertaking in which we are receiving very valuable guidance from Marvin W. Berkowitz and the Center for Character and Citizenship at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Other ventures will no doubt present themselves as we move forward with this work, for the pursuit of innovation and quality assurance in moral education is a never-ending quest for us, a journey we cannot hope to complete. It is, nonetheless, one to which we are wholeheartedly committed.