State formation, pedagogic reform, and textbook (de)regulation in Taiwan, 1945--2000 (China)

This dissertation concerns the interrelationships among state formation, curriculum change, and textbook production. I examine the unstable balance among global dynamics, the state, and opposition forces that, from 1945 to 2000, impacted the appearance, ascendancy, and residue of the pedagogic principles and modes underlying textbook regulation in Taiwan.; With its Gramscian approach in a Third-World context, this dissertation periodizes the historical development of state formation and curriculum change in Taiwan into three stages: the movement toward national standardized textbooks (1950s–70s), the first-wave of textbook deregulation (1980s), and the second-wave of textbook deregulation (1990s). I argue that, at the initial stage in the consolidating of a hard authoritarian regime, a national curriculum and national standardized textbooks were needed to establish the conditions upon which the legitimacy of a settler state and the making of a Chinese nation were dependent. Furthermore, the process of textbook deregulation can be regarded as occurring jointly with the three tendencies of nativization, decentralization, and marketization. Situated in the transition period from authoritarianism to a liberal democracy, the first-wave of textbook deregulation revealed the state's attempts to effect a partial decontrol of the textbook market without substantially modifying dominant ideologies in curricula. In sharp contrast, the second-wave of textbook deregulation involved hegemonic struggles over the decentralization of education decision making, the nativization of curriculum development, and the marketization of textbook production, along with the building of a native-dominated, liberal democratic state.; Yet, the effects of textbook deregulation have been contradictory. The centralized production of the national standardized textbook has been replaced with a new curriculum that offers some room for school-based curriculum development. Nevertheless, there are tendencies toward a privatization of textbook production that diminishes the common-good purpose of educational knowledge. This dissertation marks something of a new departure, not only in its application of the Gramscian approach to education systems in Third World countries, but also in its attempt to incorporate the perspectives of opposition movements into the analyses of state formation and the pedagogic principle.