1980 Volume 19 Pages 82-87,184
The purpose of this symposium was to explore, via discussing the problems of children's Tsumazuki, new possibilities of relating educational psychological researches to instructional practices. The “Tsumazuki” in Japanese (abbreviated as Tsu) literally means stumbling, but it is used to mean a wide variety of children's failures, from failure in an arithmetic computation up to failure in school life, and even in one's whole life.
Saheki presented a paper titled:“Tsumazuki; its causes and countermeasures-a cognitive psychological onsideration”. He classified Tsu into three categories; 1.Tsu in behavior, 2.Tsu in understanding, and 3.Tsu in inability to make Tsu; according to him, the third is the most serious. Causes of Tsu should be analyzed in correspondence with its two distinct yet interrelated phases: knowledge representation and knowledge generation. in relation to the latter, hestressed the need to study the formative process of the sense that a particular knowldge is real. The sense of reality is generated by an active schema, varying one's perspectives through vigorous activities, rather than by a passive schema locating things in one's already established frame of reference. Also he stressed the necessity of encouraging the wholistic active schema in educational psychological researches.
Komabayashi's presentation was titled: The relationship between how an instruction is and how Tsumazuki is grasped-should studies of Tsumazuki be limited to those of errors? He pointed out that the Tsu in instruction is usually interpreted as children's errors, negatively valued. However, he contended,Tsu has two meanings; the negative one of failure in development and the positive one of initiation in development, of which he stressed the latter's importance. He proposed, introducing John Holt's views, that the educational psychologists should study children's errors, while cooperating with practicing teachers in developing new teaching materials.
Takahashi's paper on “Pedagogy of Tsumazuki” presented two examples of his research on Tsu. In art education, he showed how, by introducing children to the task of self-portraits and techniques of professional artists, he succeeded in helping children overcome their lack of interest together with thir grogress in drawing. Eventually they beganto concentrate, for hours, on drawing in order to produce lively seriies of self-portraits. In physical education, he enabled almost all 40 children in a class to succeed in a horizontal bar item, while initially only 15 were successful. His pedagogy was to attempt whatever was necessary, possible and promising. He regarded Tsu in children as that of teachers, which in turn is that of teachers' teachers, i. e. universities.
Takeuchi elaborated his points:“A start from Tsumazuki”,giving a few examples taken from his own clinical experiences. One of the cases was his own experience of hearing and speaking a difficulty in his own childhood. Having been forced and traned, by a well-intended teacher, to speak just as a normal speaker would, he, a boy with hearing difficulty, began to lose his lively speech and eventually lost his entire speech. He pointed out that the more well-intended a teacher is to teach children forcibly to behave as she herself does, the more in danger she may be in causing children the fatal Tsu, i. e.Tsu as an active subject. He also pointed out that the socially successful people are oftentimes those who cannot make a Tsu, who aer too good at guessing other people's intentions so much as to adapt oneself to the way expected by others and against the way one really wishes.
