The Third Culture

Along with the trend of globalization, no other cultures have been developing as rapidly and widely as popular culture, which has become a worldwide powerful culture spread to every corner of the world. Meanwhile, in the modern society, the close connection between school education and job, employment, occupational training has constituted a global mirror image -"diploma society", and modeled the school system culture thoroughly. When the popular culture goes over the boundary of school campus, and comes across the school system culture in the school field, how junior middle school students survive under these two cultures emerges as a new research problem.Based on the view of junior middle school students, the culture of school system can be described as a "bitter culture", and the popular culture could be described as a "cool culture". This research focuses on what kind of subculture has been modeled by junior middle school students under the conflicts between these two cultures. Here the "bitter culture" is defined as the first culture, the "cool culture" is the second culture, and the subculture modeled by junior middle school students is the third culture.This research has adopted Archer's analysis frame of dual principle culture, attempting to integrate the methodologies of conformity explanation principle and the positivism research, to help us to understand, explain and demonstrate phenomena of student culture. The methods of data collection used in this research including observation, interview, questionnaire and literature analysis.This thesis is composed of five chapters:Chapter one introduces the background of this research and previous researches conducted by domestic and foreign researchers. Some questions are proposed towards the previous researches from the research perspective and method: the research angle to student subculture and popular culture is unitary.Chapter two inquires Archer's dual principle culture analysis frame and his viewpoint of morphogenesis, and its fitness to this research. This chapter also introduces the concrete research method and implementation situation in details.Chapter three describes the dominant status of school system culture and popular culture in the field of school, and traces the psychological responses of middle school students to abovementioned "bitter culture" and "cool culture". The researcher utilizes Archer's cultural analysis theory in the school field to analyze the relationship between the "bitter culture" and the "cool culture" from the condition of logical conformity and the social-culture system main body, and draws the conclusion that the culture situation of competitive contradiction, in which the junior middle school students are involved, surely brings along the changes of culture, that is, the emergence of a new culture.Chapter four selects six core cultural features, namely self-cognition, values, standard consciousness, mood expression, language style and thinking mod, to apply further cultural analysis and phenomenon explanation. It displays the new subculture produced through the interaction between teachers and students under the competitive incompatible culture situation.Chapter five carries on into the inquisition to the core characteristics of the third cultural. This chapter summarizes the "the spatial axis" nature of the third culture, and discusses the education crisis concealed underneath the third culture.The research findings are:1. "The bitter culture" restricts the lifestyle of middle school students. The stress and tension of the role, the monotony and unreachable value objectives and the harshness of the regulation and compulsion, drags middle school students into a status of "unbearable bitterness".2. The "cool culture" provides an alternative lifestyle for the middle school students, which allow them to release themselves, pour their feelings, challenge authorities, and gain adequate fun and relaxation. From the "cool culture", students feel a "unconstraint cool"3. In school field, "the bitter culture" and "the cool culture" became two powerful cultures which junior middle school students faces and thus constituted the competition incompatible culture situation. This cultural situation promotes the interaction between teachers and students and produces a new cultural pattern, the third culture.4. Junior middle school students' third culture has the following token: getting lost of self; short term effects of value; subversion of regulation; impudent pouring of feelings; multiple expression system; fixed thinking and laziness.Conclusion of the dissertation:1. The third culture has constituted the main form of the subculture of junior middle school student group.2. The characteristics of the third cultural may be summarized as a "spatial axis culture", a culture lack of pivot of core cultural elements such as ego, standard, value and so on.3. There are three kinds of education crisis brought by the third culture. First, the control status of the school system culture is in danger; Secondly, the teacher's moral authority desalinates; thirdly, the trust system and the public domain have shifted.