rival forms of schooling thereafter. Virtually all notable intellectuals were
teachers of proprietary schools.
Official state schools, by contrast, grew very slowly. Before 1690 there were
only a handful of such schools, under auspices of the feudal domains or of the
Edo government. Thereafter came a modest growth (to a few dozen) until
1770, followed by a considerable expansion to virtually every domain in Japan.
Such schools had relatively little intellectual impact. Designed to occupy and
control the samurai class of each domain, they combined elementary and
advanced curricula in a prolonged drilling in literacy, the Confucian classics,
etiquette, and stylized military arts. In the full development of the system, lower
samurai might be required to attend until age 24, higher-ranking nobles until
age 30 or even 36. Education here was an adjunct to hereditary rank, an
extension of the elaborate etiquette which filled the lives of officials and headed
off potential military conflict. Education did not determine access to official
careers, since higher positions were filled largely by hereditary rank and con-
nections; failing grades were never issued, and school progress was reported
in a rhetoric of superlatives upon superlatives. The ritualism of schooling
meshed with the administrative routine of formal requests and reports, by
which documents were accepted only if they followed precise stylistic conven-
tions. To tighten the system, in 1792 the bakufu made an effort to establish
Chinese-style examinations for appointments, but without much effect on the
usual status criteria for officeholding.
At the other extreme were elementary schools for commoners. Their origin
was in the Buddhist religious schools. In the early 1600s half of the teachers
at such terakoya were priests, and in the mid-1800s the proportion was still
around 25 percent. The big takeoff took place in urban areas in the 1750s,
resulting in widespread literacy and numeracy; by the 1840s a massive elemen-
tary school system had been developed at local initiative.
With the exception of the proprietary schools, most of this expansion of
education had little direct effect on intellectual creativity. The outburst of new
philosophy was concentrated in the generations from the mid-1600s to the
mid-1700s, when there was still only a small number of schools. In the early
creative period there may have been no more than a few dozen. But these made
up an intensely focused competitive network, structurally reminiscent of the
formative period of the old Chinese philosophical centers in the Warring States.
Kyoto around 1665 was acquiring the classic creative structure of a center of
intersecting circles of rival movements; in the next generation it was supple-
mented by network branches at Edo. The huge educational expansion of the
late Tokugawa would not be expected to do much positively for intellectual
innovation; its organizational base went far beyond the limits of the law of
small numbers, and it suffered from the stifling effects of bureaucratization,
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 353