The Curriculum Reform Of The Basic Education In Japan Since The 90's Of 20～(th) Century

Basic education is the foundation stone of educational career. It plays an important role in improving national quality, fostering all kinds of talented persons and accelerating national modernization progress etc. Education coexists with the human being, so does the relation between curriculum and education. Curriculum is the key in school education. The aim and value of education are embodied and implemented by curriculum.Among all the developed countries, Japan is developing very fast although it has the shortest industrialization history. Its educational development accelerates its economic growth and conversely economic prosperity pushes its education forward. At the same time, the reform in the Japanese modern curriculum is being developed. It owns many characteristics affected by the politics, economy and culture. Since the 90' s of 20th century, Japan has come up with a series of suggestions and policies about basic education curriculum reforms in order to adapt itself to the society' s drastic change and try to push the basic education curriculum forward, which makes it take on a lot of new characteristics.With dialectical materialism and historical materialism, using methods of comparison , literature review, and so forth, based upon the framework of specific researches on different countries, and by reviewing and analyzing the history of the curriculum change and reform in modern Japanese basic education , especially since the 90' s of 20th century, thisthesis tries to grasp systematically the present situation and tr<>nd of the curriculum reform in Japanese basic education, to summarize the basic characters and its laws, and to abstract the positive elements from the reform of curriculum in Japanese basic education , so that it can offer some reference to the present reform of basic education curriculum in China and give some advice to the construction of the curriculum system for Chinese basic education to promote the curriculum reform for the 21st. century.This thesis includes four parts. It first introduces some important concepts, the meanings of the study and the present situation. Secondly it does a history research on curriculum in Japanese basic education before the 90' s of 20th century. Thirdly it does specific research on the background, aim, content, characteristics, problems and trend of the curriculum reform in Japanese basic education since the 90' s of 20th century. Last but not least, it gives reference and advice to the reform and development of the curriculum for Chinese basic education.