abstract flow

Current discussion for the revision of the Courses of Study in geographic and cartographic area strongly recognizes the importance of studies of those areas. Especially, the interim report published in August, 2015 that showed the direction of the revision of the Courses of Study suggested that the new curriculum temporally called “Chiri Sogo” which means comprehensive geography, is needed for senior high school’s education to develop skills to solve various issues. Although the importance of geographic and cartographic educations for pupils and students are strongly recognized, antipathic tendency for learning those areas broadly observed among these children. Author shows antipathic tendency of geographic and cartographic study by analyzing Courses of Study Implementation Survey done by NIER （National Institute for Educational Policy Research）, MEXT （Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology） in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2012.

Observed tendencies are summarized as follows:

1) Antiparhtic tendency and hardness of understanding for areas, “land”, “industry” and “trade” were recognized from elementary school ages and those problems became stronger in junior high school.

2）Although there's a strong relationship between pupils' and students' favorable impression and understanding, there's a gap between degree of understanding and favor, especially in social studies at elementary school in 2003 and geographic studies at junior high school in 2001. However, this gap is observed not so much from other researches.

3）Although teachers' impression about difficulty of learning among history and geography was not so different, the degree of junior high school students' understanding geography was much lower than history. Even though many topics of geography were felt easy by teachers, students often felt hard to understand.

4）There's a difference in degree of antipathy and misunderstanding among senior high school students that might come from difference of their eagerness for further learning. Antipathic tendency for learning application of maps were observed for both groups compared to other geographic topics.

5）Antipathic tendency for field study around school area is strongly observed among high school students. This tendency might be come from specific problems in high school education.

The reason of the gap among the degree of favorable impression and the degree of understanding might be explained by shortage of teachers who majored geography at universities they graduated. Previous studies suggested that teachers who didn't major geography might not teach geography enjoyably. The studies also suggested such tendency could be much stronger in application of maps.

The attractive curriculums for teachers majored history or other subject except geography should be made and also efforts for attracting people to geography and cartographic area are needed not only in school education but also in various ways.

Notice: This report is made from authors' individual experiences on geographic and cartographic studies, and the report doesn't mean MEXT's （Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's） official positions.