Curriculum Development based on the children's learning ability

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The study aims to develop mathematics curriculum for elementary and secondary schools from the viewpoint that all the children have the splendid learning ability. In order to achieve this aim, I took notice of Gattegno's educational theory and examined it. The result suggests that he found out the splendid children's learning ability in the process of babies acquiring mother tongue during only two or three years after their birth, considered this ability as the foundation of education, self-education carried out by and for "self" living in the inside of every person as the proper education, and furthermore developed his own epistemology based on the powers of mind. The subordination of teaching to learning which is one of the principles of his education is nothing else but one to make the best use of the children's learning ability.In order to make the best use of the children's learning ability for studying mathematics, we need to notice his philosophical statement that only awareness is educable in man. Because all the children have their inherent ability to aware something, the role of mathematics teachers have only to direct their awareness to something suitable for learning mathematics. According to this viewpoint, Gattegno shows us some examples of mathematics lessons for example lessons of arithmetic using Cuisenaire rods, but these examples are described too vague to actualize them into our ordinary lessons. Therefore I developed lessons considering the present states of Japanese mathematics education so that Japanese teachers could give lessons to Japanese students, and tried some experimental lessons to students in elementary and secondary schools. As a result, we could not have a sufficient effect to the extent Gattegno told us, but we could get a strategy to break down the lessons based on atomistic teaching ideas, which are one of the urgent educational problems for us to revise.