| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,700,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
It has been widely agreed that the most important article of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child is Article 12. This article stipulates children's right to express their views freely when adults decide something affecting children. However, the legal meanings of the article and its meanings for children's developments have not been clarified yet. This study tries to clarify these questions based upon the physiological theory of Vygotsky. The results of this research are as follows.
1.The two polarized children's rights discourses, namely the will theory of right and the interest theory of right, explain the meanings of Article 12, because they share the same psychological theory on child development, which sees it as the dislodgement of irrational and asocial situation of mind to rational and social one. According to this theory, there is little reason why adults should give due weight to the views expressed by children, because the main role of the dialogue between children
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and adults is to kick out unreasonable though from children's mind and insert reasonable on into it.
2.To give Article 12 the appropriate place in children's right discourse, one should draw on the psychological theory of Vygotsky, which see children as subject from their birth and see the adults' responsiveness to desires and feelings of children indispensable for the development of the child as human being.
3.Because law's essential characteristic is its formality, it is impossible for law to assure the interactive relationship between children and adults, the mail role of law for the realization of Article 12 is to "enable" this relationship. The roles of law are to provide conditions which enable this relationship, for example, lowering the number of students per teacher, to forbid the government from such intervention into the relationship as making it impossible for adults to respond to voices from children, and to provide children who do not enjoy such relationship the opportunity to enjoy it. Less
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