How to Read Japan's National Curriculum Standards
— the Text, the Guides, and the Three Pillars

1. What the Courses of Study Are — a National Curriculum Standard

MEXT describes the Courses of Study as the national standards for the school curriculum, set "so that a certain level of education can be maintained at any school anywhere in the country." For elementary, junior high, and high school, they lay out the goals and the broad content of each subject. The textbooks children use and the timetables schools run are built on this foundation.

One more property matters: the standards are revised roughly once every ten years. As society changes, the very definition of "what and how children learn at school" gets a periodic overhaul. That revision cycle is exactly why it pays to know which version is currently in force — and when the next one is coming.

2. Which Version Is in Use Right Now?

The standards used in schools today are the ones promulgated in 2017 (Heisei 29) for elementary and junior high schools, and in 2018 (Heisei 30) for high schools (the kindergarten curriculum was revised in 2017, and the special-needs school standards in 2017 and 2019). The direction of the revision was set by the Central Council for Education's report of December 21, 2016 (Report No. 197).

According to MEXT's explanatory materials, classroom practice switched over to these standards in the 2020 school year for elementary schools (full implementation), the 2021 school year for junior high schools (full implementation), and from the 2022 school year for high schools, phased in one grade at a time. In other words, as of 2026, every student from first grade through high school is learning under the "2017–2018 promulgation." MEXT promotes this revision under the slogan "a zest for life — toward what lies beyond learning" (ikiru chikara).

3. The Map: Preamble, General Provisions, Subjects

Now for the contents. The text of the Courses of Study has three layers: the preamble, the general provisions, and the subject chapters. Keep this map in your head and it is much harder to get lost.

• The preamble — an introduction stating what the whole document aims for. This is where you find "a curriculum open to society" (shakai ni hirakareta kyōiku katei): the idea that school education should not be closed inside the school but shared with, and realized together with, society. It is the signature concept of the current revision.
• The general provisions (sōsoku) — the blueprint for the school's curriculum as a whole. Curriculum organization, lesson improvement (the "proactive, interactive, and deep learning" we will meet below), support for each student's development, school management — the cross-subject common rules all live here.
• The subject chapters — Japanese, social studies, arithmetic/mathematics, and so on, plus chapters for moral education as a special subject (elementary and junior high), foreign-language activities (elementary), the period for integrated (inquiry-based) study, and special activities. Each subject chapter follows the same template: "Part 1: Goals," "Part 2: Goals and Content for Each Grade," and "Part 3: Lesson Planning and Handling of the Content."

4. The Text vs. the Guides — Which Should You Open First?

Search for the Courses of Study online and you will meet two confusingly similar kinds of documents: the "Course of Study" itself and the "Course of Study Guides" (kaisetsu, explanatory commentaries). Knowing how these two relate is the first fork in the road.

Both are published as free PDFs on MEXT's website — anyone can read them. My recommended entry point is simple: start with the Guide for the subject and grade that concerns you. Reading the bare text first tends to feel too terse to grasp the intent; the Guides quote the text as they go and explain it patiently, so you end up learning how to read the text as a by-product.

5. The Glasses: the Three Pillars of Competencies

After the map, the glasses. The current Courses of Study organize the competencies education should develop into three pillars: "knowledge and skills," "abilities to think, make judgments, and express oneself," and "motivation to learn and humanity." This framework comes from the Central Council for Education's 2016 report and forms the backbone of the current revision.

Why does this matter for reading? Because every subject's goals are written in the order of the three pillars. Open any subject's "Part 1: Goals" and you find a preamble sentence stating the subject's overall direction, followed by items (1), (2), and (3). Item (1) corresponds to "knowledge and skills," (2) to "thinking, judgment, and expression," and (3) to "motivation to learn and humanity." Once you know this correspondence, you can read the goals of any subject, at any grade, through the same glasses. In Japanese (the subject) and some others, even the content in "Part 2" is organized under the bracketed headings 〔knowledge and skills〕 and 〔thinking, judgment, and expression〕. The numbers and brackets are not decoration — they are the design philosophy of the three pillars showing through.

Two more keywords are worth keeping at hand. One is "proactive, interactive, and deep learning" (shutaiteki, taiwateki de fukai manabi). This is not the name of a new teaching method; the general provisions position it as a perspective for lesson improvement — looking at lessons from the side of the children's learning. The other is "curriculum management": designing the curriculum across subject boundaries, then evaluating and improving how it is carried out, from the school-management side. Together with the preamble's "curriculum open to society," these three terms are the shared vocabulary for reading the current standards.

6. In Practice: a 4-Step Reading Routine for Teachers

Folding the map and the glasses into a unit-planning routine gives you this:

1. Enter through the Guide for your subject and grade — do not start by reading the text from page one. The relevant section of the Guide quotes the text while explaining intent and examples, so it is the shortest path to understanding the background of a unit.
2. Read the goals' (1)(2)(3) through the three pillars — turn the subject and grade goals into the question, "Which pillar carries the weight in this unit?" You can also see from here how the three assessment categories will map on.
3. Read "Content" and "Handling of the Content" as a set — build lessons from "Part 2" alone and you risk missing the stipulations and priorities placed in "Part 3." Always shuttle between the content item and its corresponding handling notes.
4. Return to the general provisions — moral education, special-needs support, cross-curricular competencies such as language ability and information literacy, curriculum management: the horizontal rules that no subject chapter shows you are in the general provisions. When you connect a unit to annual plans or whole-school initiatives, this is the authority to cite.

7. Three Ways Parents Can Use It

The Courses of Study are not a document for teachers only. They are published as a national standard — and given the ideal of "a curriculum open to society," being read by parents is arguably part of the design. Three concrete uses:

• Decoding the report card — as noted above, the three assessment categories correspond to the three pillars. What the category "attitude of engaging proactively with learning" is actually looking for becomes concrete once you trace it back to the standards and the Guides.
• Answering "Why do I have to learn this?" — the classic dinner-table question. The preamble sentence of each subject's goals compresses the reason that subject exists into a few lines. It is the most authoritative source for the "point" of a subject that a textbook alone will not tell you.
• Raising the resolution of open-lesson days and conferences — skim your child's grade-level goals and content before visiting a class, and the intent behind the teacher's moves becomes much easier to see. It also gives you shared ground for talking about learning at parent–teacher conferences.

8. The Next Revision Is Being Deliberated Right Now

Finally, back to that "roughly every ten years" cycle — where are we now? Deliberations toward the next Courses of Study have already begun. On December 25, 2024, the Minister of Education issued a formal remit to the Central Council for Education, "On the Standards of the Curriculum in Primary and Secondary Education." Among the items to be examined are curriculum standards that realize deep, high-quality learning while being clearer and easier to use, and a flexible curriculum that includes and supports diverse children.

The Council's Special Committee on Curriculum Planning then published an "issues paper" (ronten seiri) on September 25, 2025, laying out the overall direction of the revision. According to MEXT materials, the Council's final report is planned within fiscal 2026. In other words, 2026 — as I write this — is the threshold year, waiting on the report.

What exactly is set to change? I am planning a separate series — a "next Courses of Study watch" — that follows the issues paper and the deliberations as they progress. If you get the current standards' reading method down first, the news about the next revision becomes readable as "what changes, where."

9. Summary

One last note: the reading routine introduced here is one way of doing it. Depending on your school and subject, there may be better entry points and uses. "In my subject we read it this way," "here is how I used it as a parent" — if you have thoughts or ideas, I would love to hear them via the contact form (the article name is filled in automatically).