陶行知における郷村幼稚園の創設とその実践

抄録

Before Tao Xingzhi (1891-1946), established the first kindergarten for the common people in 1927 in China, there were only children of upper class who could have preschool education. However, Tao considered that it was the working class who really need kindergartens. The intent of this paper is to clarify Tao's preschool education conception by entering into his experiments on kindergartens in the countryside and examine the influence it had on modern China. First of all, Tao pointed out three faults of the preschool education system then. Most kindergartens were managed by foreign missionary societies, using equipments and teachers from their own country, therefore the content of teaching is unaccommodating to Chinese society and costing a lot. That was the reason why children of the common people could not enter kindergartens. In order to change this situation, Tao started the experiment on establishing kindergartens for working people in China. By fully making use of the nature materials in the countryside, the kindergartens cost less but have good effects. However, Tao faced the problem of lacking of teachers at that time. Therefore Tao suggested a system to train teachers while working. In this paper, two kindergartens were picked up as examples in order to show the progress of Tao's foundation and the detail of the administration. The most important point of Tao Xingzhi's preschool education theory and experiment is that, he has found the first kindergarten for common people, which occupied the most part of Chinese population. Tao established his own theory of training teachers, making curriculum, and his experiment of kindergartens had great influence on later preschool education in China. I'll continue to examine it.