Embed And Variation: Rural Experiences In Modern Educational Concepts

For centuries, rural education reform and research had been seeking the road of modernization under the assumption of binary opposition between the tradition and modern. The reformers and researchers believed this objective and the idea behind it almost with no reflection. However, the "natural" legitimacy and universality of this objective was damaged by social theory’s reflection to modern knowledge systems, which provides a theoretical perspective for thinking about the concept system of rural education reform and research. From this theoretical perspective, it’s not a linear development process from backward to advanced, traditional and modern concepts of education are actually two different types of concept with their own logical autonomy, and the process of modernization of the rural education idea is only a process of embedded and "reproduced" of modern education idea through the mechanisms of power. To demonstrate the historical process of rural education idea’s modernization from the perspective of grass root, this paper explores the different thinking models embedded in traditional educational idea versus modern educational idea, the "reproduction" mechanism modern educational idea played in rural area and the "reconstitution" or "re-interpretation" modern educational idea encountered in rural area based on the position of the rural people.This paper did a field case study by historical critical ethnography in village M from north Jiangsu province over a long period of time which went through the "reproduction" of modern educational idea and colliding between different educational ideas. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with over 50 villagers from village M, collected local chronicles, education policy texts and school education institutions of the county and town. The frame and structure of this paper is base on the arranging, coding and analyzing to these interview data and documents.The conclusion of this study is based on above exploring and analyzing. Before liberation, rural traditional education idea lived in rural life which featured as the thinking model of "pragmatic and experience-depending"; in contrast, modern educational idea originated from the industrial society which featured as the thinking model of "rationality". After liberation, modern educational idea embedded in village by force of state politics, and accomplished "reproduction" through the operation mechanism of "knowledge-power". The rural school was the distributing centre in county for modern educational idea in this mechanism, which distributed modern educational idea through two patterns of "direct discipline" and "indirect discipline". However, it wasn’t "hegemonic reproduction" but "interactive reproduction" of modern educational idea, which means that traditional educational idea and the thinking model of "pragmatic and experience-depending" didn’t disappear completely; it interacted as local culture with modern educational idea and "reconstituted" modern educational idea in different ways. Throughout the history of traditional and modern educational idea’s interaction, there are three obvious discontinuities which form three kinds of interaction patterns:the tradition-dominant interaction (1949-1978), the bidirectional heterogeneous interaction (1978-1998) and the rationality-dominant interaction (1998 up to now). These interaction patterns showed affinity with people’s life pattern and education’s position in the corresponding period, featured rural people’s educational idea system’s phase characteristic, and embodied modern educational idea’s encounter in rural area:"floating", "differentiating", and "dominating". All the above analysis constituted modern educational idea’s encounter history in rural area, what is more, revealed the rural educational idea’s modernization history from the perspective of grass root.