A Cultural Retrospection Over The Transformation Of PRC's Elementary Education Curriculum

As part of culture, school curriculum has been evolving along with the larger socio-cultures. Over the past 50 years since the People's Republic of China was established, the curriculum reforms in elementary education have gone through many changes. With the powerful social, political, and economical influences, the curriculum culture diagram transformation went through the Class Struggles oriented and Economic Construction centered periods; and it has displayed five characteristic phases of evolution which can be named as Cultural Borrowing and Reuse, Cultural Independence, Off-track Cultural Dilemma, Cultural Disillusion and Cultural Consciousness.During the early years of Cultural Borrowing and Reuse, PRC mainly studied and drew ideas from the Soviet Union's curriculum reforms on elementary education, renovated its old-style curriculum, and rebuilt its new-style curricula of elementary education in order to establish PRC's socialism characteristic curricula. The government set up the curriculum culture mode and curriculum system for the elementary education, which was highly monolithically managed, centered by course-structured curricula and showed far-reaching influences on the Chinese curriculum construction. During this period, the elementary education curriculum reform was characteristic with culture borrowing and re-use although it was lost of its essential significance of drawing benefits from others and applying them for ours. Therefore, it became to be a reprinting version of full Soviet Unionization without any selection, ignoring the importance of culture clusters, culture ecologies and culture traditions with regard to the curriculum reform. This resulted in a serious imbalance between Soviet Union style curriculum system, Chinese traditional cultures, contemporary cultures and Chinese reformers' education philosophy, and thus imbedded the disastrous seeds of education revolution.From the end of 1950s to the middle of 1960s was a period of cultural independence.rPRC mainly explored its curriculum naturalization on the elementary education in order to achieve the target of self-determination and full independence in the light of curriculum culture of the elementary education. In substance, this is a process of mixture and union of Soviet Union curriculum thoughts and curriculum mode with the Chinese practices of elementary education curricula, and therefore transforming the Soviet Union curriculum thoughts and curriculum mode into part of our nation's elementary education practices, and displaying the naturalized Chinese characteristics. The standpoint of naturalization was the essence of the curriculum reforms. Throughout a series of adjustment and renovation, selection and creation, the elementary education curriculum reform broke through the Soviet Union style curriculum design and curriculum management mode, and thus roughly brought along with a naturalized curriculum system of contemporary characteristics. Regrettably, the reforming process encountered some problems due to the less understanding of the fundamental principle of the curriculum naturalization. The principle should have been the guaranteeing of the union of selection and creation that leads to the success of the curriculum naturalization. The ideal situation should have discarded the thinking mode of Sino-West antagonism and body-function dualism, should have analyzed and selected scientifically components and structure of foreign curriculum cultures, should have based upon our own demands of national practices within the elementary education curriculum construction, should have enhanced the mastership of the researchers and practitioners in the education fronts, should have created a new curriculum system with both national characteristics and contemporary morale through the methods of filtration and integration. Because of the general context of relatively closed culture and overspread political leftism, the curriculum reform exclusively refused foreign cultures, especially the Western capitalism cultures, and Chinese...