伊沢修二の初等教育カリキュラム論とその普及過程 : 近代日本における初等教育カリキュラム概念の形成

This paper is an attempt to illuminate the process of Japan's modernization of the elementary school curriculum through the Westernization of Japanese educational thoughts. The transformation of Japan's modern school curriculum cannot be oversimplified or characterized in terms of modern Western notion of curriculum. The most of researchers of educational history in Japan have oversimplified the modern Japan's curriculum by emphasizing the one way direction of information flow such as importing the ideas and systems of the Western higher education curriculum. It may be true if we focus merely on the history of the higher education curriculum in Japan. On the other hand, there are a number of tacit grass roots movements to alter the meanings of the Westernization at the elementary school curriculum level. In this study, I tried to analyze the thoughts of Shuji Isawa, who struggled for the modern curriculum-making as a normal school master in the mid west region in Japan in the early Meiji era. He understood the importance of children's developmental stages in curriculum-making, which is constituted of the integrated spheres of human development, while ordinary educators misguided the dimension of child development in curriculum-making. Although Shuji Isawa's idea of curriculum have attained the fundamental traits of Western modern curriculum, his notion of curriculum was used by local educational leaders for enforcing the modernization. Those who simply adapted the logical sequential order of the expertise knowledge into curriculum-making did not understand the significant role of children's developmental stage in modern curriculum in their efforts of implementing the educational policy of the central government. The idea of modern curriculum implies that the values of self-control and well-disciplined characters of the independent individual development had been integrated with the values of subject-matter. The Japanese conflict between the traditional values and the modernization of school curriculum had driven upon the formation of the hidden curriculum of Japan's modern school, i.e., the formation of the dual curricula. Thus, the Japan's modern school curriculum has been developed in the process of hiding the conflict between the underlying traditional curriculum and the explicit Westernized curriculum structure. In conclusion, I would extrapolate the assumption that the central government's struggle for the Westernization of curriculum had to confront with the Japanese traditional curriculum thought which was rooted in the Samurai spirit. The Samurai spirit has been interwoven with the various values in the modern curriculum.