Development of the Concept of “Children” and the Educational System in Modern Japan:

From an Analysis of Writing Education (Tsuzuri-kata) in Pre-war Japan

Abstract

This paper analyses the discourse on Japanese composition writing education (tsuzuri-kata) in the pre-war period and attempts to elucidate the development of the autopoietic educational system along with the rise and changes of the concept of “children.”

The discourse on writing education provides an image of the way of second order observation on childrenʼs observation in a Luhmannian sense: (1) What were the unique characteristics of children, which separated them from adults? (2) How should adults, as socializing agents, be caring for children?

The findings are as follows: Beginning around 1900, the concept of “children” as something different from adults, but who were in the process of becoming adults, was discovered, along with an image of adults providing care for children. The “nature” and “life world” of children was discovered first, followed by the finding of the childrenʼs “interior,” especially the “childlike” interior. Finally, in the 1920s, the ability of children to “see” and “feel” things beyond the assumptions of adults was discovered. There, new practices arose, in which socializing agents demanded that children see and reflect themselves by writing, and through that, came to be “ideal children” and “future adults”.

In relation to this phenomenon, N. Luhmann suggests, in his educational system theory, that the relationship between childrenʼs observations and socializing agentsʼ second order observations enables education to become an autopoietic system. Now that we have seen the details, we can refine it. By seeing “children” and their interior as half black-box and half guidable, education was able to become autopoietic. Moreover, since the system was developed, greater freedom for children and ambivalence between childrenʼs freedom and educational intentions were repeatedly discovered within the educational discourse.