生きる力を育む上でのマージナリティの重要性 : シカゴの一公立小学校における多文化教育カリキュラム実践の分析

The purpose of this paper is not a mere introduction of the philosophy or the practice of multicultural education, as often seen. Today in Japan, multicultural education generally tends to be thought as being similar to education for international understanding, a practice for understanding the different cultures. However, the practice of multicultural education has a possibility of reforming the substantial concept of education itself, instead of just emphasizing on the issues of race and ethnicity. Its philosophy and essence can bring a fundamental reform to the daily educational practice in many classrooms of the schools in Japan, in such fields as integrated study education, social studies, language education, etc. Also it can inspire the incorporation of at least three following important elements to the educational philosophy in Japan. First, the creation of the new culture caused by the confrontation to foreignness. Second, the objectification of oneself based on the ability of analyzing the information. And third, the academic achievement based on the concept learning. It is the purpose of this research, unlike the conventional research, to investigate the principle of multicultural education standing on the hypothesis mentioned above. The goal of the practice of multicultural education in the United States is the co-living of the various individuals, each of them maintaining their cultural identity at the same time. Therefore it can be mentioned as a practice for fostering "the competence to live" in this modern society, continuing to become more diverse, more complicated. And there it can be found not only the understanding of the different cultures but the basic elements of the character formation, such as extension of one's self-respect, acquisition of the objective grasp of oneself, development in understanding and considering for others, and fostering the broad social awareness. From the point of view as mentioned above, this paper verifies the practice of multicultural education, based on the positive data collected by the writer's own fieldwork. And it can be said as a result that the actual development of the children was seen to a considerable extent in the five developmental territories (self-grasping, respect for others, social awareness, information analysis, and academic achievement). Also, "marginality" in two different meanings can be considered as the extremely important elements of this educational practice: first, to recognize oneself as a marginal man, and second, the marginal conditions of the educational environment.