earticle

영어

This essay shows that TSUCHIDA Kyôson (1891-1934), philosopher and leader of the movement of Free Colleges of General Education, 1920-30, constructed theories of education in a roundabout way. He was influenced by the book Proletcult written by Mr and Mrs Paul from England. But they were strongly against the general education for the labour class, to sharpen an attack on The Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), a famous institution of general education, condemning it as a class-struggle breaker. Tsuchida said that the theory of the Pauls was wrong, because they neglected lots of the legacies of human being, as Shakespeare’s works or ancient Greek arts. Blaming the Pauls, Tsuchida gradually made his theories, never investigating WEA, though he got much data of it. Tsuchida looks to have distrusted on it, for it decreased the tutorial classes of economic studies, so, from his viewpoint, WEA looked like Essa Summer College in Niigata Prefecture, a government agency established to raise supporters of the imperial state. The author thinks that Tsuchida’s neglect on WEA deprived him of getting the method of creating autodidact culture at Japanese Free Colleges of General Education. For this reason, the number of the audience decreased at the Free Colleges in the last half of the 1920s, and at last they faded out.