Lifelong Learning

The Faculty of Humanities is ideally suited to lifelong learning by virtue of its focus on humankind and culture and its composition of the five disciplines: philosophy, history, sociology, language, and literature. Long in the vanguard when it comes to lifelong learning, the Faculty has been offering three main programs in this area: the Saturday College, visiting lectures and public talks.

The Saturday College

The Saturday College was established in 2001 along with the visiting lecture programme. The Saturday College offers lifelong-learning lectures where working adults, university students and high school students can study together. Since the University’s privatization The Saturday College has been conducted in cooperation with The University’s Community Future Center.

Public Lectures

Each year the Faculty has held public lectures in major cities within the prefecture, with the support of the respective local Board of Education. These events seek to present to the public the results of our current research, thus increasing the visibility of the Faculty. Until 2011 two lecturers talked around a common theme, with a dialogue that reflected each speaker’s specialty.

The 19th lecture was held in Kudamatsu City on the theme Time as Represented in English Literature (Professor Susumu Tanaka / Professor Kazunari Miyahara) .
The 20th public lecture was held in Shimonoseki City on the theme Aiming to Create a Yamaguchi Area Studies Program (Professor Seiji Tanaka / Professor Tomohiro Nakamura) .
The 21st public lecture was held in Nagato City on the theme Japan as Seen by Foreign Cultures (Professor Franz Hintereder-Emde / Professor Yutaka Hirayama) .
The 22nd public lecture was held in Houfu City on the theme Regional Idiosyncrasies and Community Development (Professor Hidehiko Tsubogo / Professor Noriko Otani) .
The 23rd public lecture was held in Shunan City on the theme Preventing the decline of Language Diversity (Assistant Professor Hideyuki Inui / Assistant Professor John Phillips).
The project ended with this lecture.

Since then, open seminars have been held in collaboration with the Hofu City lifelong learning project.
2012 fall: Communication Skills Training Program (Professor Shinichi Hayashi).
2013 fall: The World of Language (Professor Masashi Takemoto / Professor Manabu Wada / Assistant Professor Hideyuki Inui / Professor Miwa Tomihira).
2014 fall: Another Qin Shi Huang and His Great Ruins (Professor Ma Biao)
2015 fall: Hofu Tenmangu Shrine in the Middle Ages and the Picture Scrolls (Assistant Professor Takayuki Maki).

Visiting Lectures

The visiting lecture program was established by the Faculty in 2001 with the belief that issues associated with human nature ought to be considered collectively with local people, and not confined to the halls of academia. Lectures are held in this spirit in conjunction with municipal history and lifelong learning courses in places such as high schools in and outside Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Currently, the University’s Community Future Center accepts requests for lectures on our “visiting lecture list”, whereupon academic staff visit the high school or institution in question.