心理学知識の受容が学校にもたらす意味の再検討

――心理学知識と子ども中心主義の親和性――

抄録

Recently, the active acceptance of psychological knowledge has progressed in Japanese schools. The institutionalization of school counselors is a typical feature of this movement. Generally this movement has been understood as one aspect of the psychologization of Japanese society as a whole. The psychologization of Japanese society has been conceptualized as a trinity of the following three components. The first is the acceptance of psychological knowledge. The second is an enlargement of the value of psychological reductionism, which is regarded as encouraged by the spread of psychological knowledge. And the third component is an enlargement of the value of emotivism, which signifies attaching great importance to taking care of the minds of oneself and others. Psychologization is a phenomenon under which these components progress simultaneously.

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the general presupposition that the active acceptance of psychological knowledge in Japanese schools is one aspect of psychologization of Japanese society, using analyses from nationwide survey data. It is certain that all the three components of psychologization are commonly observed in Japanese schools today. However, we lack sufficient evidence to believe that there is correlationality between the components and that they have a meaningful association.

Data from JGSS-2005 were used for the analyses. Although the units of the data are individuals, the data contain variables that can be used as indices for all three components of psychologization. Can it be said that the more psychological knowledge one has, the more psychological reductionism and emotivism one adopts when considering the child’s education? The author examined this question using loglinear models and logistic regression analyses.

The results of the analyses made it clear that people with psychological knowledge showed a tendency toward emotivism, but did not show a tendency toward psychological reductionism. From an additional analysis, it was found that the cause of the spurious correlation between psychological knowledge and psychological reductionism is educational background. This finding has some implications. The active acceptance of psychological knowledge in Japanese schools should not be perceived as one aspect of the trinity of psychologization. Rather, it should be interpreted as a diffusion of a child-centered perspective, which is affinitive with emotivism.