Joint Studies on Aging and Death : With Special Regard to the Theoretical Foundation of Life-Long Education

1)我们进行了合作研究，以重建教育理论，建立一个关于人的生成的综合理论。这是通过打破传统理论中只关注“儿童”、“生命”、“青春”等方面的狭隘限制，将这些方面扩展到人的存在和成长的整体来实现的。我们已经从重新思考终身教育理论的原理开始了这种理论的拓展。2）然而，这种拓展只有在我们敢于科普被忽视的“衰老与死亡”主题时才能实现。因此，我们对终身教育的研究，已逐渐发展为对“老化与死亡”的综合研究。本研究不仅涉及教育理论的主要任务，而且涉及在一个迅速而激进的年龄等级社会变革中迫切需要解决的社会文化问题。1989- 1990年获科研补助金资助（合作研究A），我们试图通过一系列的七个3或4天的研究会议和进一步的日常研究联系，通过邮件或电话在两年的时间里接近这些巨大的任务。发现从人的整体生成的角度来探讨“衰老与死亡”的文学作品并不多见。然后，我们制定了一个框架和程序来分配任务给每个团队成员。第二年，我们做了一个报告，在报告中，我们发展了以“衰老和死亡”为重点的人类生成综合理论，以完善我们对人类理论的发展。但主要是由于时间限制，研究计划未能圆满完成，成为我们预计将发表的已完成工作的预备报告。编写本报告的工作反复提出了一些有趣的问题，供今后研究人类世代周期和个人生命周期之间的复杂关系。

1) We have made our cooperative study to reconstruct theories of education in order to make a comprehensive theory on human becoming. This was accomplished by breaking the narrow limits of the usual theories which focus only on "children" , "life" , "youthfulness" etc. And expanding these aspects toward human-being and -becoming as a whole. We have already started this theoretical expansion by reconsidering the plinciples of theories on lifelong education.2) However, this expansion can be achieved only when we dare to cope with the overlooked themes on "aging and death" . Thus, our study on lifelong education has gradually been developed to a comprehensive one on "aging and death" . This study deals not only with the principal tasks for educational theory, but also with the urgent socio-cultural problems in a rapid and radical social change of age-hierarchy. Aided by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research in 1989-90 (Co-operative Research A) , we have tried to approach these vast tasks through a series of seven 3 or 4day research sessions and further daily research contact by mail or phone over a two year period.3) First, we examined the referential literature exhaustively, and found an absence of literature discussing "aging and death" from the viewpoint of human-becoming as a whole. Then we made a framework and program to allot tasks to each team member. In the second year we made a report, in which we developed the comprehensive theory on human becoming focusing on "aging and death" to round out our development of a theory on human-being. But mainly due to time restrictions, the research program could not be completed satisfactorily and became a preparatory report to the accomplished work which we expect to publish. The work of preparing this report repeatedly raised interesting questions for future research on the complex relationship between the human generation cycle and the individual life cycle.