アメリカの高等教育のデス・エデュケーション草創期の講義に見られる文学教材の取扱いについて

抄録

Death education was was first taught by Robert Fulton at University of Minnesota in 1963. In those days, in America, the influence of the Vietnam War, the fear of nuclear war because of the Cold War, the beginning of organ trans plants, and the hospice movement led people to think about the various problems of death. Then, death education became widspread from higher education to secondary and elementary education.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the name of literary works chosen as death education teaching materials, to investigate the contents of them and to analyze the student’s impressions of them. The paper chooses Dr. Edwin S. Schneidman’s course at Harvard University (1969), Dr. Douglas K. White’s course at the University of Michigan (1970), Dr. Frances G. Scott’s course at Oregon State University (1971).

At Harvard University, James Agee’s A Death in the Family (1957), Ernest Hemingway’s various famous works such as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old man and the Sea (1952), and W. Y. Evans Wentz’s Tibetan Book of the Dead (1957) were read by the students.

The University of Michigan used Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych (1939). Oregon State University used the Death of Ivan Ilych and Thomas Wolfe’s Of the Time and the River (1935).

To reach the objective of this paper I need to have the analysis from two aspects. First is to analyze the contents of the stories. Death of Ivan Ilych and Of the Time and the River focused on dying patients. In those days, On Death and Dying written by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was a bestseller and people paid great concern to the dying patient’s mental condition.

Though death educators in higher education did not preach Christian doctrines in death education curricula, some praying scenes were in Death of Ivan Ilych, Of the Time and the River and A Death in the Family.

Their novels involved the theme on death and dying. However, they did not increase the fear and the anxiety of death. The heroes passed away with hope. Their literary works made the students think the dignity of life.

Second is to analyze the papers written by the students. At Harvard University, the students wrote the compositions describing their impressions of their novels. A student reading A Death in the Family realized the taboo of death in modern American and understood the meaning of the special term such as appropriate death in death education in the story. A student reading Hemingway’s various famous works realized that his works portrayed life in view with inability to compromise with death. A student reading Tibetan Book of the Dead perceived the difference of the concept of death between the West and the East.

From the above analysis, it is obvious that the literary works used in death education illustrated not the fear and the anxiety of death but the dignity of life and played an important role for students to understand death and dying.