The Concept of the Aim of Education on the Fundamental Law of Education

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This study aimed at clarifying the concept of the purpose of education, "perfection of personality" in the Fundamental Law of Education, based upon the idea of personality of Kotaro Tanaka, who, as Minister of Education, initiated the enactment of this law. The results of this study can be summarized into the following three pointsFirstly, I showed that the origin of the purpose of education could be traced back to the commencement speech of the Tokyo Imperial University, which Tanaka made as Dean of the Faculty of Laws In 1937. He said in the speech that the ultimate goal of politics and man was ethical consummation of personality.Seondly, I followed the change of Tanaka's philosophy up to his idea of the ultimate goal of politics and man, starting with the thought of his youth. Two new materials, which had not been used in the previous studies of Tanaka, were applied for describing the thought of his youth. One is Tanaka's foreword to the translation of a biography of a German painter, and the other is a speech that he made, when he was a non-church Christian.Thirdly, I proved that Tanaka's idea of personality largely depended on the theory of personality of a French Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain, which I think is the most important result of this study. This proof is mainly based on a letter from Tanaka to Maritain, dated on 19th March 1931, which I found in the Maritain Study Center of Kolbsheim during my visit to France.