アメリカ中等教育「地理」の衰退:1892-1910

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This essay does not try to prove the decline and fall of the secondary school geography in America during the period 1892-1910. Rather it stands on the assumption that such a fate has really befallen the subject. Given this premise, what this essay tries to do, in general, is to inquire into the question of how this decline and fall of the subject was brought about. In particular, the essay tries to show how William M. Davis of Harvard, under whose leadership American academic geography is said to have reached "its pinnacle of respect and achievement", contributed to the increased disfavor of school geography, in spite of his effort to improve the latter. The essay also intends to explain how G. Stanley Hall, who, in his emphasis on the child, seemed to stand at the opposite of Davis, was equally responsible for the observed ill-fate of school geography. And in doing all this, I wish to clarify the significance of the demise of the subject for the destiny of the educational movement, called Progressivism, which started in the late nineteenth century and decisively split up during the 1930's. I would like to conclude that the decline and fall of school geography during the period 1892-1910 was due to the split introduced in the education of the subject by way of two channels. On the one hand, William M. Davis and his followers increasingly "objectified" the content of study, by restricting its topics to land forms and their transformation. On the other hand, in his emphasis on child study, G. Stanley Hall separated the learner from itself increasingly "objectified" study, by concentrating on the inquiry into the child in his relative independence of environment. Between these two movements in opposite directions, school geography lost its foothold. For the subject was by its very nature not a discipline with some strictly limited methods and object of study like botany and zoology. Rather it was the study of the surrounding world from a distinct point of view: namely, man's interaction, in a social setting, with his natural environment, or in McMurry's words, "subduing of and being subdued by" nature. With the separation of the object and "subject" (learner) of study, that is, with the loss of the common ground of experience in McMurry's sense, geography virtually lost its raison d'etre. The lost world of geography was also the lost world of one mode of social activity of man to which McMurry and Dewey, among others, tried to give an explicit formulation. The decline and fall of geography, thus, meant more than the demise of a single subject. It also marked the disappearance, at least as the dominant one, of a mode of man's social experience in nature from the midst of which he looked at the world around him, and thus of a basic principle upon which man's knowledge about himself and the world was organized.
国際基督教大学の論文

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立川明
国際基督教大学

アメリカ中等教育「地理」の衰退:1892-1910

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