How Mathematics was Taught in the “Girls’ Course” and the “Second Course” of the Wakayama Normal School in the Late Meiji Era.

Abstract

　　 Wakayama University has a large amount of archives of the Wakayama Normal School, the predecessor of the present university.  The author had showed some charectaristics of geometry and other subjects in the Wakayama Normal School, mainly concerning on the “boys’ course”.  The archives contain a certain amount of documents of the “girls’ course”, and the “second course” which was established for the graduates from other secondary schools.  In this paper these documents, such as school syllabi, was analyzed and some characteristics are shown as follows; First, “girls’ course” flexibly changed their mathematics curriculum and textbooks, and kept as high level mathematics education as the “boys’ course” including, for example, solid geometry.  It was much higher than girls’ high schools at that time.  Second, although the “second course” students had high basic knowledge of junior high school, the range of educational content are basically limited to arithmetic, which might be learned in the previous schools.  It might be thought that arithmetic was enough to teach at elementary schools.  The “second course” of the normal school is said to have become a source of upgrades from secondary school to university.  Educational content of the “second course” and its transition to higher education need some more research from the point of view of elementary school teacher training.