National Consciousness And Regional Culture

National consciousness is a multiple and compound existence of people's attitude, emotions and cognition to their country, gradually developed through the time. Nation in itself is also a regional concept, which consists of pieces of land and certain population, so national consciousness means regional consciousness in some way. National culture is consisted of lots of unique regional cultures. It's quite helpful to foster the citizens'attitude, emotions and cognition to their nation when they identify their own regional cultures. Citizens'identification for the regional culture is the source of the national consciousness.By the paradigm of interpretive anthropology, text analysis and field work, with its hundreds of years'vicissitude, this study focuses on the double cultural senses and its unity of national consciousness and regional cultures that Henan local knowledge teaching materials contain, and analyzes how the materials as complementary teaching texts inherit the regional cultures and construct the national conciseness effectively.At the end of the Qing dynasty, the society and nation are confronted with transformation and revolution. The local records were a result of the Qing government's compromise and reforms when dangers rose. With the internal revolt and foreign invasion, the Records of Local Region in this period tended to serve the mainstream value and nationalism, and obviously revealed a kind of national consciousness. Then the national consciousness and patriotism was strengthened and fostered by the identification of local ideas. This function of the local records exists through the time.In the period of the Republic of China, Kuomintang united the country formally in the warlords'dogfighting and foreign invasion. Meanwhile the ideas of local autonomy, the Rural Reconstruction and the Rural Education were popular. In Henan Province the Department of Education regarded the local knowledge materials instruction as an ideal way to cultivate ethos, but it was quite difficult to publish the local knowledge materials for the pupils and high school students in that hard and complicated time of wars. However with the ideas of local government and education autonomy, lots of local knowledge teaching materials appeared in some rural education experiment areas of Henan, which included the basic education contents, such as literacy, health, living and citizen education. So, the local knowledge teaching materials of Henan during this period can be regarded as an educational way to meet the local people's survival and living needs, and their main functions were educating the masses, revitalizing the countryside, achieving the local government and education autonomy.Great changes happened to the education with the founding of the People's Republic of China, which needed urgently to build up socialistic consciousness. Henan local knowledge teaching materials at the end of 1950s and in Cultural Revolution revealed strong national consciousness, which were filled with national political culture and conveyed national political words firmly in the frame of regional culture.With the policy of reform and opening up, China focuses on economy development and emphasizes basic knowledge and basic skills in education. Then Henan local knowledge teaching materials turned to carry more basic knowledge between 1980s and 1990s. In 21st century, local governments are aware of the significance of the local cultural industry. In Henan the local government is putting more efforts in the revival of Zhongyuan culture, then the Henan local knowledge teaching materials are coming to a prosperous time. With the national reform of three-level curriculum management, lots of local knowledge teaching materials of high quality come into being. The local knowledge teaching materials include not only regional cultures but also patriotism for regions as parts of a nation, by which it is quite possible to practice moral education. At present, local knowledge teaching materials in Henan assumes the innovation of school moral education, in which Approaching Hongqi Dyke written by No.2 Experimental Primary School in the city of Linzhou is a good example that links regional cultures with moral education. But in practice publishing the local knowledge teaching materials is facing lots of embarrassments which restrict its cultivation function. In Henan province the publishing of local knowledge teaching materials tends to be unstable, its evaluation mode should also be improved, cost and exam-oriented trend are two typical problems.In short, by the changes of Henan local knowledge teaching materials we can conclude that the local knowledge teaching materials play the double roles of national consciousness construction and regional culture inheritance, which is also influenced by the traditional idea of co-construction of home and country, and Henan people's understanding of their local culture.