地理的経験領域の拡大

Abstract

Learning how to study the landscape is essential in functional geographic education because the landscape is the basic source of all geographic knowledge. Field trips or traveling to observe the geographic features of the local environment provide opportunities for direct learning experiences through which pupils are taught from the first to understand that geography deals with real life and that the knowledge acquired from it has a genuine significance. A Japanese proverb also says, “Seeing is believing.”It is essential for the curriculum builder to know where pupils and their family have ever been, that is, the places of their traveling.Urban dwellers travel in more places than rural dwellers in every age group.More prefectures are visited by adults than by pupils. There are onlya few prefectures that more than 50 per cent of the first grade pupils of lower secondary schools have traved in. It is in the eight prefectures, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Ibaraki, Chiba, Saitama, Gunma, Shizuoka and Fukushima except their home prefecture Tochigi that most adult inhabitants of Utsunomiya City, Tochigi Prefecture have traveled. The prefectures of West Japan are scarcely visited by them.The number of prefectures visited by an adult is influenced by some factors -the traveler's sex, occupation, and school career. School career seems to be most important among the Japanese people.In the course of this study of ours we have made a new discovery which was not made in our former stduy in Izu District, Shizuoka Prefecture in 1952. It is the fact that a “fault” lies between the 20-29 age group and the 30-39 age group in the number of their visited prefectures (Fig. 6). Recently many youngers continually make a trip in different places after they complete the lower secondary school courses.