Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine the problems of the curriculum-making in modern Japan. A number of educational historians have assumed that the modern education in Japan was hindered from developing the autonomy and creative curriculum formation because of the strict national control. They pointed out that various types of activity-oriented curricula existed as planning at various schools and were introduced to the many schools for their practices. Those are called "New Education movement" in Japan. But they recognized that the goal of the movement turned out to be insufficiently accomplished, in particular, the curriculum development was not thoroughly elaborated. In this paper, I explored the achievement and the meanings of the experience-based curriculum-making at Tajima elementary school. The curriculum-making at that school can be considered as a pioneer of the New Education in the 1920s and 1930s in Japan. Hiroshi Yamazaki, a leader and the principal of the school led the teachers' practices to the curriculum steered by Soju Irisawa's theory, who was an associate professor at Tokyo Empire University at that time. In order to analyze fundamental problems underlying an innovative educational practice, I further proceeded my exploration to the structural formation and its intended ideas in making the humanized life science curriculum, called "Seikatsuka" at Tajima elementary school. As a matter of fact, it is a problem that the teachers could not understand the ideas and goals of their curriculum planning. At the same time, it should be recognized that it is imperative to further the exploration of the profound issues of their unsuccessful practices. Regarding the Tajima elementary school curriculum, the "Seikatsuka" was based on the theory of "Kultur Padagogik", which was the main tenet of their practices. The main characteristic of this theory is its assumption that the substance of the culture should be realized in the spirit which is formally structuralized by the cultural values intrinsically possessed by human beings. Its basic assumption should be interpreted as follows: Human culture is created on the basis of the historical heritages of human creatures. But it never ends as the status quo but always alters in the process of renovation and restoration of the human cultural creation. Thus it was assumed that a learner must be not merely a subject accepting the cultural milieu but a subject initiating cultural creation by interacting with the cultural heritages. Through this interpretation, Tajima elementary school had to be managed to plan their curriculum to continually renovate and reconstruct the meanings and the substance of the cultural heritage by children's experiences interacting with cultural heritages. Tajima elementary school teachers attempted to reconstruct the curriculum by investigating and coordinating both the community cultural heritages and children's spiritual structures, which are suggested by Edward Spranger's theory. But I found it problematic that they failed to identify and elaborate the structural formation of human aspects interweaving with cultural aspects. Tajima elementary school teachers were not aware of that it was needed to reinterpret the intrinsic values of the community culture into the appropriately structuralized cultural forms in terms of children's instincts. In other words, Seikatsuka was a subject which ideal could not be attained without understanding the children's cultural values which were created by their own cultural milieu.
