著者

福永 義臣

出版者

九州大学

雑誌

飛梅論集 : 九州大学大学院教育学コース院生論文集

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2, pp.181-209, 2002-03-27

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Town and village libraries just started to be established in the 1920's and 30's. Even the existing libraries were poor in volume and function. In the early period of local libraries, a prefecture-wide reading education was promoted mainly by the prefectural library and developed as a self-learning activity of the local residents in the age when social education was regarded as enlightenment. It was led by Kunizou Nakata, chief librarian of the Ishikawa prefectural library. Nakata's belief was "the real meaning of education was self-education", which could be analyzed as "constant learning for life" and "the most effective way of self-learning was reading, which was the royal road for life education. "He tackled with reading education for rural youths who were well motivated but could not take school education. He made every efforts to from reading classes for young people in their twenties and a reading co-operative for such people who finished their reading classes. He also endeavored to establish juvenile libraries for those who had finished compulsory education. The prefectural library association, the co-operative libraries, the middle school league could not have been established without him. The reading he proposed was not for sophisticating themselves. It was reading education as a life improvement that was synonymous with "reading is life" being symbolized by" a book in one hand, a hoe in the other. " In other words, reading was food for life and decided lives' goals. It was that they tried to change themselves and aim at social reforms through reading. It was a self-learning education activity that realized people were in the center of learning even in the age of enlightenment. This paper tries to make clear the things the previous studies did not clarify. It also was refers to the underlying thought and significance of these activities as library's function of social education through my direct and correct analysis on his activities in Ishikawa Prefecture.