We started the education to raise children's creativity 32 years ago. In "The alteration of the class to raise creativity", the first research, is written as follows:
　 "Our education , in a word, is the one which puts its first priority on each child. This does not mean to spoil them. This education respects the opinions, utterances and hopes from the bottom of our hearts, to appreciate their personalities, and deepen their meanings. That is to say, we put the focus of education on the children, and develop their ideas deeply by stimulus from outside. Our education respects children's free spirit, and develops their individuality and creativity."
　This is our school tradition. However it is not easy to put this spirit into practice, and we have made many trials-and-errors.
　During the first ten years of this education for creativity, we found that the work of the imagination plays an important role in the developement of the children's thinking and expected their thinking to develop by setting the learning stages of "chaos, association, imagination and reconstruction."
　We also recognised that the association of different kinds can change children's points of view and develop their creative thinking.
From 1975, we noticed that "the switchover of perspectives" can be done in group thinking in which children respect each other, and make their best efforts to grow individuality in a learning group.
Soon we found the problem of the existence of the children who cannot express themselves and seemed to be buried in the group, so we started to see the class from the children's point of view who are on the weak side in the group. Then the idea of independence came up, which we have put into the center of our studies since 1981.
　 We stand on the idea that "Children hope to understand feelings with other children and teachers naturally and to be independent in whatever situation they are in", because we doubted if one of the obstacles of their independence might be us ourselves.
　 In the former study we paid attention to the "mutual understanding" with other children because we believed that the ability "to be creative and independent" came from the connection with other people.
　 In this study we are proceeding with research aiming to raise children who understand each other through international understanding under the theme "children making rich human relationship".

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