A Philosophical Reflection on the Disaster and School Education

This paper considered the disaster and school education from philosophical perspectives: 1) Brian Denman proposed the paradigm change of the educational research from individual to society with his new concept "education security." It was clarified that we would be able to take this idea to examine the foundation for school education after the disaster. 2) John Dewey wrote that society existed through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurred by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. Without education as communication, social life could not survive. We should consider this Dewey's insight into education and society again in order to create a new basis of school education after 3. 11. 3) It was suggested that we would need to consider a broader philosophical idea behind the phenomena, namely to think about the structure of dependence. The disaster thrust the limitations of the modern values of independence and individualism before us. Although the notion of dependence was usually referred to a negative meaning such as amae in Japanese, we would be able to reinterpret the idea of "depending on each other" positively.