The Research On The Institutionalization Of Curriculum Reform

As one authoritative system of conduct rules, the institution which is one historical existence could regulate the social relationship. Including political institution, economic institution and cultural institution, the social institution which is prevalent in our lives affects and regulates people’s lives and behaviors all the time. As one public utilitie of modern countries, curriculum reform which matters the healthy development of the majority of young children and the improvement of the country’s comprehensive national strength is one complex social system. From a political perspective, multi-power achieves through curriculum reform; from a cultural perspective, it is a process of diverse educational concepts’ race debut and competition with each other; from an economic perspective, it is a redistribution process of the cultural capital. Curriculum reform is driven by the subject of power who has a specific educational concept for achieving the power reproduction, stratification of the knowledge and redistribution of interests through the reallocation of the cultural capital. However, the curriculum reform as a strategy to shrugg off the crisis of the education system is aimed at achieving the public interest and the equilibrium between the education system and the external environment. If there are not institutions to adjust the relationships of the power, the value and the interests in the process of curriculum reform, it will cause power repression, cultural hegemony and imbalance of interests, which is not conducive to the smooth development of curriculum reform. Therefore, we must establish a series of institutions to lead its direction toward rationality and to ensure the smooth progress of curriculum reform. The process of establishment of a series of institutions is institutionalization. Building rules is the core of institutionalization of the curriculum reform. The opposation to institutionalization for institution is a product of natural evolution, belittlement institutionalization by preconceptions, rejection of institutionalization in the goodness of man, refusation to institutionalize by special conditions of our country and the complication of reform are fundamentally untenable.The new curriculum reform initiated at the turn of the century has made great progress and achieved some success in which we established institutions initially. But judged by the measure of institutionalizational level put forward by Samuel P. Huntington, the institutionalization of our curriculum reform is still at a low level. Many institutions are not sound, imperfect or irrational, which has led to widespread dislocation in the process of curriculum reform, such as bureaucracy, empiricism, formalism, aggressive and other undesirable phenomena that have seriously interfered with the normal development of curriculum reform. However, from the main trend of the international curriculum reform, the majority of countries have adopted legislation or established other formal institutions to ensure the rationality of the curriculum reform action. Higher institutionalization is a significant feature of curriculum reform in Japan and it is worthy of carefully studying and learning for us. On the basis of affirmative and negative grasp of the existing institutions of curriculum reform, curriculum reformers initiativly reflect on the reform action, so they could be aware of which rules can ensure the reasonable conduct of curriculum reform and are need to be kept to become the institution, which is the generating process of the institutional consciousness of the curriculum reform. What expressed conscientiously by reformer with the institutional consciousness is the institutionalization of curriculum reform.The rational institutions of curriculum reform can ensure freedom of the curriculum reformer and contribute to the formation of good order of the curriculum reform. In the past, because of miss or irrationality of the institution, our curriculum reforms are often trapped in a disorder cycle. The essence of the disorder cycle is the conflict and contradiction between freedom and order in curriculum reform. If we stress freedom excessively, curriculum reform will fall into the irrational and arbitrary oriented morass; if we stress order simply, curriculum reform will walk into the mechanizational and unified position. These two cases are both not conducive to scientific development of curriculum reform. So the institution of curriculum reform should reconcile freedom and order scientifically to form a kind of orderly freedom which we call "order of liberty". The "order of liberty" aims to make the curriculum reform conducive to the scientific development of education, the all-round development of the young children and ultimately the harmonious development of society. Reasonable construction and innovation of the institution of the curriculum reform can not be based on the subjective will but the correct theoretical foundation and the guiding ideology. In the process of curriculum reform, the initiator and participant of the reform should uphold the spirit of public rationality to creat new institutions or improve the existing institutions for the balanced relationship between right and obligation, which is the institutional rationality of the curriculum reform. The basic features of the institutional rationality of the curriculum reform include:alert to the present and future-oriented, paying attention to the form and juggling the substance, democracy ahead of free and fair ahead of efficiency; clear and equal between the power and responsibilities. The institutions of curriculum reform include the rational institution of curriculum decision-making, curriculum management, textbooks, curriculum implementation and curriculum evaluation. And the institution is made of institutional concepts, system of rules, regulated objects and rendering media. The five areas of the institution of curriculum reform should be combined with the four elements of the institution to institutionalize curriculum reform. The general procedure of the institutionalization of curriculum reform is to analyze what is the regulated object, then create the system of rules and institutional concepts based on the attribute of the regulated object, expressed the above content in the form of a formal institution finally.Curriculum reform which is a complex and systemic project needs to be safeguarded by the institution. However, corresponding institutions are established which do not necessarily guarantee the success of curriculum reform and the achievement of reformers’goals. The institution of curriculum reform has its own functional limitations. The mechanism of the institution is "discipline" rather than "self-discipline". Each subsystem of the institution runs independently well, while as a whole a functional friction phenomenon may be output. The above is the inherent limits of the institutional functions. In addition, the object of the institution of curriculum reform is the real man. When the man upholds the opportunist attitude to act or the institutional concept is ahead/behind of the change of the social environment, the institution will be useless. The above is the external limits of the institutional functions. The running well of the institutions of curriculum reform and the smooth progress of curriculum reform need also a good social culture atmosphere, the enhancement of the reform participants’ professional and moral standards.