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Knowledge Import Or Institution Reconstruction

Posted on:2005-04-06Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y J KangFull Text:PDF
GTID:1117360155477422Subject:Education
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Long living in a high consubstantial culture and lacking the powerful foreign cultural threats and competitions, the tradition China focused politically not on handling the relationship among heterogeneous cultures, nor on uniting all the native powers to resist the foreign threats, but on suppressing the wealth amassment and the feudal separation, in order to clear away the local spontaneous political challenges to the traditional ethics, life styles and power structures. As a result, the traditional Chinese society lacked a kind of public life and the related knowledge storage, but prided itself on the Celestial Empire, and ignored the imminent foreign threats. Just when the modern China declined but the western powers turned into the express highway of the development, the Chinese people was compelled to develop a new political culture to stand upon the Chinese nation's integrity and the Celestial Empire' s dignity.But the new political culture couldn't successfully come into being under the dangerous and disastrous circumstances. The fact that both the official and the folk long suppressed the wealth amassment and the interest polarization made the Chinese society short of a middle class, the backbone of a modern society, to support the social transformation at several historical turning points, which seriously impeded the spontaneous transition of the traditional China to the modern nation-state. The brevity of the enlightenment movement, caused by the impatience and the worries resulting from the contrasts between the past glories and the present decline and the political urgencies resulting from the troubles both at home and abroad, made it hard to successfully make up for the intrinsic knowledge shortage in the Chinese society by academic means. Those conflicting thoughts without sufficient exchange, syncretism and argument in the democratic revolution scenes made a kind of Strong Knowledge lmport System get the control of the post-revolutionary society.What the New China pursued was the strategy of the high-speed industrialization for the purpose of establishing a heaven on earth, from which the public school system of the New China directly arisen. To carry out this strategy, the public school system strived to provide an army of workmen with the socialistic consciousness and the socialistic culture on the one hand, and on the other hand, the New China put a bridle on the spontaneities of the educational practice to avoid the interference with the strategy, especially to avoid the excessive occupation of the economic surplus caused by the education. However, the Strong Knowledge Import System, adopted in the New China's education and aiming at equaling and surpassing the developed countries, so seriously underrated the complexity of the knowledge problems, as not to mitigate the knowledge problem but to cause the long-term succumbing to the rational knowledge and its personal subjects. However, even under this Strong Knowledge Import System, knowledge endogenesis couldn't be prohibited completely. It was this kind of knowledge endogenesis that finally urged the Chinese public school system to walk up to a totally different developmental way after the Cultural Revolution. The Opening and Reform has greatly bettered the knowledge conditions in theeducational arena. Particularly, the rational educational knowledge has been decentralized, and the education reforms out of different knowledge sources have presented their realistic effects tremendously, which all have eased up the knowledge pressure in the education to a large extent. But the knowledge hierarchy remains, and the blockage due to the vertical-horizontal division exists too. The views on the educational knowledge and the epistemology of education behind the practices are still rationalistic. Both of them disregard the subjectivity, diversity and decentralization of the educational knowledge and observe the hierarchy of rationality. As a result, they are still satisfied with the large-scale knowledge import and attempt to overcome every kind of cognitive risks through the personal "free and balanced mind*. And at last the knowledge has been isolated, absolutized and personalized. Thus the reform is still coercive, and its coercion can be found out from the below factors: the governmental control, the reform goals divorced from the living context, the scientific management based on those numerous and trivial rules, the compulsive remolding of the teachers' ideas, the closed trials based on the vertical-horizontal division, and the unilateralistic concept of the educational practice.However, the heritage of the education reform over the past 20 years is not purely a pile of irrelevant and helpless educational problems. Some elementary organizational conditions adapted to the market economy and the intrinsic needs for an open competitive order have been taking shape. The institutional games aroused in this process have also realistically deepened the present reform. Thus, it is my belief that the public school system in China will probably take the way to the public education system via the common education market and accordingly the governance structures of the public school will change profoundly. The most urgent at present is to relocate and reform the education reform itself, so that we can give priority to the institution reconstruction to help the practitioners on the spot free of the administrative control and the logic harassment, urge them to confront the real educational needs and the actual market competitions so as to generate the sustainable motive for the self-regulated learning, and make them do their best to create the characteristic school as a value community based on the teacher professionalization.
Keywords/Search Tags:public school system, knowledge import, education reform, institutional bottleneck, knowledge problem, epistemology of education, open competitive order, common education market, school governance structure
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