2015 Volume 82 Issue 4 Pages 520-530
A “community” that eliminates “privateness” is often compared with “publicness” that makes the most of “privateness.” Comparisons assuming a difference between “privateness” and “publicness” cannot show the generative correlation between them. Through the mutual becoming of different generations, people grow mature together. People who have grown mature in this way jointly produce “publicness.” Through the mutual becoming of different generations, the asymmetry between preceding generations and subsequent generations changes to symmetry. Thus publicness is generated.
“Publicness” is a “movement” generated through education as the mutual becoming of different generations, rather than a particular “state.” Publicness, educational publicness, and the publicness that connects generations all belong to the same generative movement. Seen from the viewpoint of education, publicness is always “generative publicness.”
The older generation seeks to find a proper response to the younger generation’s situation of mixed dependence and independence. If this is accomplished, both generations attain maturity as autonomy. Publicness is a product of mutual becoming among different generations.
Publicness is a generative movement which activates and brings all members up to autonomy. Even people who cannot participate in verbal communication should be integrated into the communication that makes up publicness. How can people with verbal ability successfully communicate with people who do not have a means of verbal communication of past, present, and future? In other words, how can a wide and rich generative publicness be generated?
Generative publicness is formed by the response of the people with verbal ability to those who do not have a means of verbal communication. Educational publicness is a product of the mutual becoming of teaching generations and learning generations. It is at the same time a product of the mutual becoming of teachers and learners, of teachers, of researchers, and of educational practitioners. Let us look back on the theory construction process of Akira Mori (a leading scholar of pedagogy in postwar Japan) in order to think about educational publicness as a product of the mutual becoming of researchers and practitioners.
Mori took part in the huge collective postwar work of trying to make a theory of education and generate educational publicness, and eventually moved away from it. He also showed the direction of a new theoretical development aiming to generate “generative publicness” before he passed away.
Mori fought desperately to repair the rift of specialization in the industrial society system which is overly specialized. His theory on educational publicness and generative publicness is an outcome of his struggle. Learners, teachers, educational practitioners and researchers should cooperate with one another. Then generative publicness is genereated, and educational publicness and the publicness that connects generations are able to appear. However, collaboration is very difficult to achieve in the situation of fragmented specialization.
The only way to fix the rift is “half body stance (Hanmi no Kamae)” in which you set foot in both divisions. Generative publicness can be organized with the cooperation of the people with this half body stance.
