State Examination in Civics for Middle School Teacher Candidates in Prewar Japan (Special Issue Dedicated to Professor Kunio GOTO)

This paper is a part of joint research which intends to make clear what kind of knowledge and aptitude was required of middle school teacher candidates in the state examination which was one of the important ways of teacher training in prewar Japan. Civics is the target subject in this paper. What was the aim of civics in prewar Japan when the Emperor was treated as a personal god? Its main aim was to give pupils nationalistic moral education, so the most important ability for the civics teachers was teaching method and aptitude for moral education. Nevertheless, the state examination in civics did not always examine this aptitude in candidates. It put stress on technical knowledge about the discipline rather than on teaching method and technique of moral education. Why? Civics in prewar Japan was a leading subject that had to integrate the other subjects from the standpoint of national morality. As a result civics became an extremely hard subject to put into practice, because it was required to relate each example of teaching material to other subjects-national morality, history, Japanese language, geography. Therefore, it became almost imposible for examiners (professors and a politician) who usually had no knowledge of the middle school curriculum to examine the teaching ability of candidates. National morality that was closely connected with civics was based on Japanese mythology. Consequently candidates of civics were demanded to be irrational or hypocritical when they had to answer questions concerned with national morality. The fiction that Japan was a divine country with a personal god at its center inevitably produced a lot of hypocrites.12KJ00004276411論文Articledepartmental bulletin pape