Pedagogical experiments with working class children in prewar Japan

This dissertation examines how writers, educators, and other cultural workers experimented with literary forms in their efforts to address the social marginalization of the working class child in 1920s and 1930s Japan. The project is an examination of the challenges that were lodged against the centrality of the ideology of the middle class child, and explores the historical context, the evaluative discourse of literary magazines, and the classroom practices that were part of the endeavors to create a working class culture for children.;Each of my chapters examines the experiments surrounding a particular literary form: children's stories, prose compositions called "tsuzurikata ", and poetry. The first chapter takes up the appearance of the proletarian children's literature movement and its magazine, Children's Battleflag , and argues that the stories produced as part of the movement are fascinating experiments in reconfiguring the form for the enjoyment of working class children. The second chapter examines how teachers of the rural Tohoku region in northeastern Japan practiced new pedagogies of a prose writing essay form called "tsuzurikata" as a means of reflecting upon the realities of their every day lives. The third chapter examines how poetry composition was used in classrooms as a uniquely promising means of fostering self-expression. Examining these popular efforts reveals that writers, teachers, and other cultural workers cherished the pedagogical capacity of literature to cultivate and embolden young minds, and struggled against the abstraction of literary forms from the lived realities of working class children.