戦後初期成人学校の大都市部における展開

Social education (adult or non-formal education) projects of municipalities in postwar Japan started in association with a framework based on Kominkans (or Community Learning Centers), which were suitable for the social conditions of rural areas. On the other hand, a contrasting framework of social education projects in municipalities also appeared in the end of 1940s. It was the framework based on “adult schools.” Adult schools established in many large cities at that time offered participants(students) more advanced, more systematic, and more various courses than those of kominkans. Many staffs and researchers on social education in those days remarked the possibility of “adult schools.” Today we can rarely find public projects titled “adult school” in Japan. Most of adult schools were renamed and restructured as “Courses for Citizen,” “Civic University,” and so on by now. The staffs and researchers on social education today seldom use the word “adult school.” Addition to this, there are few articles or books for historical research on adult schools in postwar Japan. This article focuses on the development of adult schools in metropolises in the early postwar period (1945 to 1955) to lay a foundation for the comprehensive history of adult school in postwar Japan. We selected five cases: the adult schools in Kawasaki City, Yokohama City, Tokyo Metropolis, Nagoya City, and Osaka City. We examined what these cases have in common from four viewpoints: circumstances concerning establishment of adult schools, average time allocated to each course and trends of contents, attributes of participants, and how participants engaged in management of adult schools and how they formed groups. We have found some common trends of adult schools in metropolises at that time as below. Firstly, in most of cases the education boards of municipalities already started some projects of adult education courses before establishment of adult schools. The concept of “adult school” offered a standardized and systematic framework to each municipality. Secondly, we can find considerable similarity on the contents of courses in adult schools, and the “liberal arts education” counted in most of cases. Thirdly, the majority of participants were white-collar and graduates of upper secondary schools. The most part of them were latter teenagers and early twenties, and there was no clear imbalance in sex of participants. Finally, the participants played certain roles in management of courses in their adult school (as members of management committee, for example) and often formed various reunion groups in most of cases.