石神 真悠子、江川 愛都紗、江口 怜、田中 智輝、鈴木 康弘、李 舜志
September,2016
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between “the social” and education from the two viewpoints of educational history and political philosophy. Since it has not been certain what “the social” signifies in its history of cross-sectional usage, the aim requires two ways of approaching it: one is to look at specific historical events that are both social and educational, and the other is to grope through the crossing point of “the social” and education.
In the section 1, we consider history of education as “the social” by focusing on three cases. The first case is the special elementary schools for poor children from 1900s to 1920s. The second case is the operation of milk stations by The Bureau of Social Welfare in Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The third case is the plan of Koumei Elementary School’s establishment, which is the first school for the children with physical disabilities in Japan. It will be shown from these cases that education as “the social” has, at the same time to be an amphiboles apparatus of exclusion and inclusion, the political possibility.
The undeveloped momentum, such as the ones shown in the cases of section 1, is theoretically extended in the discussion in the field of political philosophy. In the section 2, we try to reconsider the concept and idea of “the social” in Hannah Arendt’s thought. Although she wrote critical of the rise of “the social,” she found affirmative value about school as “the social.” Therefore, school as “the social” has not only a negative face as the apparatus of discipline, but also another face as the foothold of political resistance.
Through the two ways of approaching “the social” and education, it will be articulated where the two cross each other, and how.
