著者

山本 雄二

出版者

日本教育社会学会

雑誌

教育社会学研究 (ISSN:03873145)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.59, pp.69-88, 1996-10-15

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"Ijime" has been one of the most serious problems in the field of primary and secondary education in Japan since late 1970s. "Ijime" is generally thought of as continual acts of violence including insulting words on victims by their classmates which sometimes force the victims to kill themselves. But the arguments have often suffered from the following question : how do we distinguish it from other similar acts? Ijime was defined by physical and mental pain of victims and this definition made it logically invisible. This paper focuses the arguments around the logically invisible ijime and discusses what effects the arguments have actually had on school management and the general concept of education. For this purpose, I analyzed the discursive formations of ijime-discourse from the view point of "articulation" which was introduced into the field of cultural studies by Stuart Hall et al. It sees a discursive formation as complex processes of articulation, de-articulation and re-articulation of discursive elements. Ijime-discourse consists of various elements, for instance, victims' deaths which made ijime a serious problem, the attitude of the audience and other indifferent classmates, the responsibility of teachers or school boards, and the school system itself. Ijime-discourse is not just unity but a compound of contradictory discourses. All the elements in it echo, confront or reinforce each other and ijime-discourse can be transformed beyond the control of discourse-makers. It also makes ijime-discourse open to possibilities for de-construction of itself. One of them is to put it into wider educational context which demands a charmge of the concept of education itself. Another one is de-construction of ijime-discourse into political discourse. Both examples of de-construction show that any one of the practices of discursive formation is political. Most ijime-discourses, however, have concealed their political character and have tried to fill every school with a psychological perspective which is, in itself, a very political way of management of schools. To know that any practice of discursive formation is political may lead us onto new horizons where we can see our education in a different way.