The Social Logic Of The School Behavior

Because of their popularity, schools have become one of the most numerous organizations in China at present. The importance of schools has increased along with their number, for every person in modern society has an experience of school life longer or shorter, and schools have indeed affected people's lives to different degrees. Yet, out of proportion to its number and importance, the school in China is rarely known to us, and on this base, many criticisms have been made on schools. Considering realistically, if we do not know the daily actions of schools, we can not propose schemes and measures for school reform. Understanding is the prerequisite of the reform, not vice versa. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand and recognize the mechanism of a school's activities with a case of a township middle school. It consists of seven parts, namely Introduction, Chapter I "Approaching a School and Methodology", Chapter II "The Background of Schools' Activities", Chapter III "Various Facets of Schools' Activities", Chapter IV "The Motivation of Schools' Activities", Chapter V "Mechanisms of Schools' Activities", and Conclusion. The paper has discussed the following issues.Based on the judgment of the increasing diversification and heterogeneity of current schools, the paper introduced "relational methodology" in terms of the research on schools' activities, holding to use "typical case study" in the analysis. The author has not only defended this method but also applied it on the level of schools' conduct study.The paper maintains to recognize school conduct in the framework of the state-society-school relations. State is only one of the factors affecting school conduct; in this aspect we come to the conclusion that school activities are the same. We should not neglect the affect of society, which means in this paper the local community or "relational network" at some distance from the "state"; in this perspective we make the conclude of difference, namely the difference of schools resulting from various local knowledge, in other words, different local societies shape different school activities.Under the double influence of the state and society, schools have lost its autonomy. Exactly because of the struggling yet cooperative relation between the division or the emerging division of state and society, the nature of "semi-autonomy" of school activities has come into being, which can be proved in the analysis of schools' resource acquisition and allocation.