1930年代の明石女子師範学校附属小学校におけるカリキュラム構成 : 公開研究会教案に基づく分析

The aim of this paper is to clarify and examine characteristics of curriculum reconstruction in the Elementary School attached Akashi Women's Normal School in the 1930s, which is one of the most remarkable achievements at the rising period of the curriculum reconstruction movement in prewar Japan. This school began to innovate the national curriculum in 1927, after its head teacher, Heiji OIKAWA (1875-1939), returned from his stay in Europe and U.S.A. for the purpose of educational research. His ideal plan of the elementary school curriculum was not based on such existing subjects as national history and mathematics, but on the "life units" that should be constructed to make children understand various dimensions of life ways they were facing in their daily lives. However, since educational contents of elementary school were strongly controlled by the state and the textbooks were limited to those published by the Ministry of Education, the teachers had to face difficulty of building up relations between the national curriculum and the one constructed on "life units" studies. To overcome this difficulty, they developed "life unit study based on the subject" and made them coexist with the ordinary "life unit" studies in the curriculum as follows; (1) Ordinary "life unit" studies were, as a whole, adopted in the lower classes and "life unit study based on the subject" in the upper-grade (2) The number of ordinary "life unit" studies increased after 1936, the year when Oikawa left the school. The characteristics of "life unit study based on the subject", which Oikawa recommended, was in the formation of the children's attitudes necessary for understanding life ways through various activities, while enabling them to know the content of the existing subject. After analyzing the general feature of the school curriculum, this paper took up some teaching plans of life unit studies base on national history as a case-study. Those plans can be categorized into three groups. (1) The ones which focused on the customary way of interpreting the textbook. (2) The ones promoting children's various study activities, but ending in the confirmation of the knowledge of the textbook. (3) The ones trying to deepen children's understanding of life ways in their daily lives, and, at the same time, make them acquire the skills for historical research through various activities. The principle of teaching plans were not necessary unified throughout the school. Some of them were obviously influenced by the existence of national textbooks and the necessity of making children remember them as a preparation for the entrances examinations of the secondary schools. But those attempts that tried to unify the entire curriculum by making a bridge between the existing subjects and the innovative "life unit" studies can be highly evaluated, considering the main trend of the curriculum reconstruction movement was escaping that difficulty by limiting the "life unit" studies only to the lower classes and not trying to reconstruct the existing subjects.