2016 Volume 65 Issue 3 Pages 15-27
In the article ““F” Is the Word” in the August 2015 issue of this magazine I described our functional relations to objects under the concept of “F” to analyze the way we can make sense of the world around us. Here I will apply the same concept to the educational field and examine functional relations in the teaching of kokugo. We may think that a kokugo class just consists of a teacher, students, and a textbook, but actually it is not possible without having direct or indirect relations to other units such as the institution of literature, the publishing industry, the family system, and the national policy of the government. In short, even the act of teaching is structurally caught in the economic and social network or the “F” system. But we the teachers may affect the status quo if we strategically take advantage of the very system which in principle has a potentiality to cause epistemological shifts through interactions between units.
