SYMPOSIUM: PROBLEMS OF GEOGRAPHICAL EDUCATION

Abstract

Geographical education is an important subject within the framework of national education in the world. In the case of Japan, however, it does not play an effective role, and various problems have occurred, especially in the field of national education, in recent decades. The purpose of this symposium is to elucidate the problematic points of geographical education, and to reconstruct the new paradigm in this field. The participants in this symposium were made up of seven reporters, four commentators and one guest speaker. The themes presented by seven reporters were as follows: 1. TANAKA, Kozo: Curriculum of geography and editing methods of textbooks of Japanese language and social studies in compulsory education. 2. SEKIGUCHI, Tadashi: Problems on the textbook of high-school: A case of “Geography B”. 3. NAKAGAWA, Koichi and KAGEYAMA, Yuji: Critical approach to the geographical studies; a case of Japanese regions. 4. KIMOTO, Tsutomu: On the basic theory of geographical education. 5. OKADA, Makoto: Contribution to geography from the educational circle geography. 6. SASAKI, Hiroshi: Education of geography and comparative study of cultures. 7. MASAI, Yasuo: Education of geography and understanding of cultures through the method of the comparative area study. Concerning these reports, the commentators posed some questions and gave egective comments and various discussions with many attendants achieved quite good results. Though we have not come to a definite conclusion, we have confirmed the necessity of studying many problems concerning geographical education in cooperation with both researchers and teachers of geography. These are namely reformations of theory in regional geography from the viewpoint of education, comparative studies on the methodology of geography and the area study, and methodological study for the introduction of cultural geography to geographical education. The second symposium would be necessary to continue these discussions mentioned above, in the near future, in order to obtain some meaningful and creative results.