Paper short abstract:

With the concept of "freedom", this presentation will consider the ethical basis of the Plurilingual and Pluricultural Competences-PLCC and the Competences for Democratic Culture-CDC, based on phenomenology, to make Japanese language education more comprehensive in the society of "living together".

Paper long abstract:

With the concept of "freedom", this presentation will consider the ethical basis of the Plurilingual and Pluricultural Competences-PLCC and the Competences for Democratic Culture-CDC. Each idea advocated by the Council of Europe, such as plurilingualism, aspires to a society in which people of different languages and cultures "live together". PLCC and CDC are the results of this philosophy.

In this way, language education has become a field that deals with values such as human life and the state of society, and an ethical foundation is needed to support this. For example, how can the ideals of human rights, justice, equality in the CDC's "values" be justified? If we treated them as absolute values, education aimed at them becomes obligatory. It is less likely to be the basis for the principle of coexistence with others with diverse values. This is because language education, which assumes human rights as undeniable absolutes, can sometimes turn into oppression of particular kinds of persons. Kim (2006) advocates a "rule-based human rights principle" based on the human nature of freedom rather than a "value-based human rights principle" based on the absoluteness of human rights. This is the idea that human rights arise on the basis of consensus and agreement, which presupposes that human beings, in principle, follow their desires and bump up against each other's desires. Dialogic value creation principles, such as the "rule-based human rights principle," are more open as principles of civic participation, and it is in this mechanism that the importance of "language" is opened up.

This presentation explores the foundations of the Council of Europe's proposed principles and competencies and considers their interrelationships from the views of human rights theory, ethics and language based on phenomenology. From this viewpoint, we aim to make Japanese language education more comprehensive in the society of "living together".

Kim, T. (2006) Kyosei shakai no tame no futatsu no jinken-ron (Two human rights theories for a coexisting society), Tokyo: Transview.