Thoughts On U.S.A.'s Curriculum Reforms After World War Ⅱ

U.S.A.'s curriculum reform is an old topic because of its being researched a lot while it is a new topic because of being researched from a new angle. Beginning with a brief review of the facts of U.S.A.'s curriculum reform after World War II, this paper tries to find the author's own research foothold, and to make some explanations to relative problems of U.S.A.'s Curriculum Reform after World War II.There are three representative curriculum reforms in U.S.A. after World War II: disciplinary structure movement, carried on from the end of the fifties to the beginning of the sixties of the 20th century;back to basis, in the seventies;standard-based reform, since the eighties. This paper tries to study to these reforms with a comparatively macroscopic and whole visual, probe into some systematic characteristics which were embodied in these reforms: a kind of deep crisis awareness;a real goal and a obscure goal;motivation from politics, economy, science and culture;resistance from the system, educators, multiple culture, and some interest groups;and flexible strategies.After analyzing the systematic characteristic of U.S.A.'s Curriculum Reform after World War II, this paper cast the starting point on curriculum reform in a larger scale instead of U.S.A., draw the following conclusions:1 Essence of reform: a combination of risk, uncertainty and complexity. The risk of the reform does not merely means the possible failure of reform, but that there is no way to accurately speculate whether the reform will be successful or not. The uncertainty of the reform is determined by the uncertainty which exist in our realization and the reality. The complexity the reform stems from the interaction between various key elements of the reform, it is a connection between unity and variety .2 Dialectical evaluation on curriculum reform. First, there are two focuses in this dialectical evalution: the implementation and the design of curriculum reform. Second, the pluralism of subject who made the evaluation leads to the pluralism of criterion. Third, the result ofevaluation is not simply "success" or "failure", in contrast, from this angle of "multi-win", everybody can get something in the reform.