A.D. C. ピーターソンのカリキュラム構想に見る一般教育観

―シックス・フォーム改革案から国際バカロレアへの連続性に注目して―

抄録

A.D. C. Peterson (1908-1988) was an English pedagogist and well known as the first Director General of the International Baccalaureate (IB).

This paper aims to examine his educational philosophy in two curriculum plans for upper secondary education through document surveys. The first plan is the reform of the English sixth-form curriculum in 1960. He was the Director of the Department of Educational Studies, Oxford, and strongly opposed to the over-specialization present in the sixth-form curriculum in England then. The second plan is the IB Diploma Programme established in 1968. After the failure of the English curriculum reform, he participated in founding IB and greatly influenced the shaping of its program.

He consistently emphasized general education in the sixth-form curriculum in each plan. Currently, general education refers to basic education for acquiring an ability to read and write or liberal arts education for knowledge on a wide variety of subjects, and not specialized knowledge education. However, Peterson had a characteristic philosophy of general education. In his concept, there is no conflict between general and specialized education. This is because the aim of his general education is not providing general knowledge, but developing ways of thinking: moral judgement, aesthetic taste, logical judgement, and empirical and experimental judgement.

He believed that every pupil could then develop such ways of thinking through each specialized subject, provided they study both arts and science course, as there are peculiar relations between the subjects and ways of thinking. For example, he claimed it possible to teach both moral judgment and social intuition either through literature or history, although the latter is probably better suited for developing empirical thinking; however, neither of these capacities can be developed through mathematics.

From the perspective of designing a curriculum, I point out two important achievements of Peterson’s. First, he argued uniquely that the essential aim in the sixth form is developing specific ways of thinking through each subject. He included both arts and science subjects in his curriculum for this purpose. Second, in the sixth-form curriculum reform, he devised a unifying and complementary course to compensate for each subject’s individual study by combining several subject matter and pupils’ experiences. This idea was succeeded by the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course as one of the core courses in the IB Diploma Programme. It is based on the notion that there are important ways of thinking common to several discipline.

Additionally, from the viewpoint of Peterson’s philosophy, it can be said of the IB Diploma Programme that he attempted to balance general and specialized education by setting a variety of subjects, and that he created an additional opportunity for general education through the TOK course.