著者

乙訓 稔 オトクニ ミノル Minoru Otokuni

雑誌

実践女子大学生活科学部紀要

巻号頁・発行日

no.48, pp.39-51, 2011-03-10

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The Japanese defeat in the Japan-U.S. war on August 15, 1945 brought a big change for Japanese education. That is a democratization and the peaceful justification of the education by the occupation army. As a result of the reform, the social studies were born. Kaoru Ueda was a central person to elaborate a plan of social studies in the education ministry in those days. In Kaoru Ueda the purpose of the social studies education as an aim of new education to establish Japanese democracy was to bring up an independent human being who takes responsibility, thinks by oneself and acts in the relations of the mutual aid. Especially, he intends that the social studies bring manners as a good member of society and the ability of the child, and the social studies that he thinks about are interpreted as a subject of the child priority principle to respect the interest of the child. In addition, as for the method of social studies, the learning method for a child to solve a problem freely and voluntarily is thought about in Ueda, and a unit learning to respect the independence of will of the child and a teacher is adopted as a concrete method. By this leading idea of Ueda, there were the social studies as a symbolic education subject of the post-war Japanese educational reform until Showa the latter half of 20's. However, the Japanese education policy and the social studies were changed in quality by the conservative politics that revived under the international situation of Japan-U.S. peace treaty, and moral education, the so-called in other words "hour for morality" was specially set up and was required from September 1.1958(showa 33). This specially set up "hour for morality" was fixed at a set time once a week and the specially installed moral education was isolated from not only the moral education but also the education such as social studies and extracurricular activities, the homeroom brought a tendency to fall into a one-side education which injected an item of virtue. To inject an item of virtue was opposed to social studies education of Ueda that intended learning through an experience of the self in one's own interest of free learning. In conclusion, the loss of the origin of the postwar democracy education, and the change in quality of the moral education disturbed the formation of the independently individual and the democratization of japan including such social studies up to today. I think that it makes the Japanese democratization incomplete and picks the bud of democracy.