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

1)开展合作学习，重构教育理论，形成全面的人的生成理论。这是通过打破通常只关注“儿童”、“生命”、“青春”等理论的狭隘局限而实现的，并将这些方面扩展到作为一个整体的人的存在和成为。我们已经通过重新思考终身教育理论的原理开始了这种理论扩展。2)然而，只有敢于应对被忽视的“衰老和死亡”主题，这种扩展才能实现。因此，我们对终身教育的研究也逐渐发展到对“衰老与死亡”的全面研究。这项研究不仅涉及教育理论的主要任务，而且还涉及在快速而激进的社会年龄结构变化中迫切需要解决的社会文化问题。在1989-90年的科学研究助学金(合作研究A)的帮助下，我们试图通过一系列7个3或4天的研究会议和两年时间内通过邮件或电话进行的日常研究联系来解决这些艰巨的任务。3)首先，我们详尽地查阅了参考文献，发现从人类整体的角度来讨论“衰老和死亡”的文献是缺失的。然后，我们制定了一个框架和程序，为每个团队成员分配任务。在第二年，我们做了一份报告，其中我们发展了关于人的全面的理论，以“衰老和死亡”为重点，完善了我们关于人的理论的发展。但由于时间限制，研究计划未能圆满完成，成为我们期待发表的已完成工作的预备性报告。编写本报告的工作反复为今后研究人类世代周期和个人生命周期之间的复杂关系提出了一些有趣的问题。

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.