フレデリック・リスター・バークの教育思想における自発性の原理 : 児童研究と進歩主義教育の間

This paper aims: (1) to examine the process of formation of the principle of dynamism in the educational thought of Frederic Lister Burk; and (2) to make clear the relation between child study and progressive education, focusing on the change of the meaning of spontaneity or dynamism. Frederic Lister Burk, the first president of San Francisco State Normal School from 1899 to 1924, represents a vital link between the child study movement and the progressive education movement. He was a disciple of G.Stanley Hall, the father of the child study movement, and a mentor of Carleton W.Washburne and Helen Parkhurst who were both influential progressive educators in the 1920s. Burk studied psychology at Clark University in the mid-1890s and became an admirer of G.Stanley Hall. He believed that the child, if given complete freedom, would recapitulate the development of the race naturally, and assumed that the internal forces of the child would lead to its development. The curriculum of the kindergarten, he asserted, must be based on the process of human development, or the genetic order. Burk became a superintendent of public schools of Santa Barbara, California in 1898. He was still so impressed with child study and the recapitulation theory that he introduced free play into one public kindergarten there. He thought free play would give children opportunities to develop naturally without any disturbances. He and staff members of Santa Barbara public schools made some experiments to examine and classify children's free and spontaneous activities. The experiments, unexpectedly, showed him that children's spontaneous activities were not simply recapitulation of lower races but included creative expressions. After the experiments, Burk attained a very different view on child development from Hall's. He noticed the importance of environments and creative expression of children that would direct their development, while Hall believed in natural or genetically determined development of the child. He became the first president of the San Francisco State Normal School in 1899. He abolished the lock-step system of instruction, and devised individual instruction to develop child's dynamism. Burk thought dynamism included not only spontaneity and internal forces but also creativity of the child. Carleton W.Washburne, Working under Burk at San Francisco State Normal School, studied Burk's individual instruction, and later elaborated upon it to devise the Winnetka Plan. Helen Parkhurst, Who was the supervisor of all Montessori schools in the United States at that time, imitated Burk's individual instruction to invent the Dalton Plan. Burk learned through child study that the child should be educated in accordance with his nature and heredity. But he changed the deterministic view of the recapitulation theory that emphasized heredity and nature too much, because he found creative impulses in child's spontaneous activities and thinking that later he called dynamism.