Chinese University And Political Socialization

As the advancing of socialistic democratic politics in our country, it will be the primary mission of Chinese universities to cultivate responsible and rational citizens for our democratic society. However, there is not a formal civic education system, in our higher education, which has being instead by the ideological and political education system. Evaluation results of3,623undergraduates’ civic attitudes and civic behaviors, in this study, indicated that the ideological and political education could not afford to the important historic mission of eligible citizen cultivation for democratic society.Previous civic education in universities always takes a political learning route, attitude-behavior, focusing on how to cultivate and strengthen students’positive civic attitude and behavior disposition through the instructions of classroom knowledge, neglecting the important influences from students’ practical behaviors and experiences to their civic attitudes. Instead of maintain and strengthen student’s existing positive attitudes and dispositions, the participation lacked civic education will thoroughly vacillate and transform them because of the cognitive dissonance created by the contrast between democratic idea and realistic situations.Civic Participation theory from political science and Cognitive Dissonance theory from social psychology may provide us a new research perspective and the prospective direction of university civic education (UCE), therefore our research object is the construction of participative UCE system. Firstly, we discussed the object and connotation of UCE, on the basis of literature analysis and history research, and evaluated the effectiveness of current UCE from the standpoint of microcosmic evaluation so as to understand its realistic dilemma, and then tried to construct a cyclic type political learning model. Secondly, we abstracted4participation models and their features and functions from case analysis of6universities, then discussed the realistic feasibility for the combination of students’participative practices and civic education. Finally, we probed the main objects, principles, routes and strategies of participative civic education to explore the reconstruction of UCE, based on the opportunities and challenges confronted by the combination.The research results proved these followings.(1)It’s the primary mission of universities to cultivate eligible citizens for the democratic society. Universities should play an important role in civic education, because that their good campus culture, independent and free academic idea, democratic instructional idea, and equal relations between teachers and students could provide the development of undergraduates’ democratic characters. The students’ various spontaneous associations and their democratic participations in different kinds of university affairs could bring them with important platforms for democracy trainings. Such good educational atmosphere and practical platforms then could apparently offset the negative effects of political socialization resulted from many social and family factors including gender, birthplace, family income, parents’ education background.(2)School education in different stages has different features and functional goals in the process of political socialization. University civic education, in which the development of democratic awareness and participation ability should become two basic points as the increase of rational thinking and conscious actions, tends to emphasis individual automaticity and consciousness, compared with the goals of civic education in basic education stage.(3)Students’ participation is not only the goal but also the main method, and then the key factor in the success of UCE. Civic awareness and the sense of political efficacy could bring active positive impacts to student’s participative behaviors. In other words, the stronger the civic awareness is, the more confident to their political influences, the more frequently their autonomous participations. Active and automatic democratic participation could not only improve student’s cognition and understanding to civic phenomenon but also benefit to the development of their emotional identity of their universities and country, and the promotion of their senses of efficacy in the participation in democratic political events. Only the application of student’s participation can get them more involved in the democratic participation practices, and then help them to enhance their practical participation abilities, to learn how to think rationally and judge independently, and to strengthen their civic attitudes.(4)Students’ participation has significant accumulative effects, and there has been a certain progressive relation among various participation models. The more students’ practices are, the stronger their civic awareness and sense of political efficacy. The lower tier participation is the premise of the higher tier ones, only after students’learning and acquisition of decision making in lower tier transaction management could they make voice in the higher tier participations in the political learning process.(5)Attitude-behavior route in students’ political learning is theoretically feasible, and the democratic practice reproved its realistic feasibility. University campus is appropriate and capable to be the training grounds for students’ democratic activities. We could only guarantee the achievements of UCE’s goals through the construction of an all-around and multi-layer student participation system because of respective features, functions and approaches of different participation models.