5　「平和的生存」をつくる学習　幡多地域における教育実践に着目して

抄録

In Japan, poor labor conditions are closely related to the buildup of military forces. In thinking about labor, the question of what it means to live in peace is raised. This paper investigates 1) what system of everyday labor could allow people to live in peace, and 2) what kinds of learning can enable us to create such systems.

To answer these questions, I analyze an educational practice in Hata, a district located in western Kochi Prefecture. The inhabitants of Hata have sought to create a system enabling them to live and work in a more peaceful environment. In the 1980s, high school teachers involved in the teacher’s union, as well as their students, investigated and held hearings for fishermen from Kochi Prefecture who had become victims of American nuclear experiments as crew members on Japanese tuna fishing boats active in the Marshall Islands in the 1950s. The teachers and students learned about the exploitation involved in the labor system through this investigation, and came to understand that the harder inhabitants of the region worked, the poorer their lives within the system would be.

In the late 1990s, Masatoshi Yamashita, in collaboration with inhabitants of the region who agreed with his idea, was a key initiator of an educational practice that attempted to create a labor system; this educational practice was conducted to spur high school students to live their lives in their own way. To create such a system, the wisdom of the inhabitants of the region, regarding their struggle to labor in coexistence with nature, was studied. Yamashita and the inhabitants of the region found that their labor, through their engagement with the ecosystem, was interrelated. In this educational practice, Yamashita’s mission was to recreate relations between workers through a consideration of the ecosystem. In 2009, they created a regional market enabling workers hoping to protect the nature of the region and other local inhabitants to meet each other.

The findings of this paper are as follows. 1) A labor system that enables life in peace is one in which people take care of nature and the inhabitants of the region in which they live, not one that facilitates competition between workers. 2) The system can be mediated through studying the wisdom people have acquired through their struggle to labor in coexistence with nature.