The Child Is The Curriculum: Value And Possibility

The child is the curriculum emphasizes and gives prominence to that the child is the main body of the curriculum. He is one part of the curriculum. The curriculum can not be dissociated from the child's life and can not rule the child. The child is the curriculum's organizer and the participant. The child's life world is the curriculum's content. Child's experience, life, personal history, and creation can become the curriculum. The curriculum is the activity that child constructs his life significance through reconsidering and creative practice. The child's experience, reconsidering, inquisition and creation are the basic way for curriculum learning.This thesis elaborates the relationship between the child and the curriculum by documentary and analytic methods. It is consisted of four parts.The first part follows the history of western view of children. It reviews the opinions of child in different historic period. Take ancient Greece time, European medieval time, Renaissance time, end of 19th century to beginning of 20th century time, end of 20th century to beginning of 21st century time for example.The second part proposes how regards the relations between child and curriculum and elaborates the child is the value main body of the curriculum. The child's life world is the curriculum's content scope. The child is the inventor of curriculum process. The child's experience, reconsidering, inquisition and creation are the basic way for curriculum learning.The third part discusses the value and the limitation of the opinion that child is the curriculum. The value is that the opinion may call human's reconsidering for new times, liberate the child, liberate the teacher and liberate the curriculum. The limitation is that it proposed so high requests for child and teacher that it is difficult to implement.The fourth part, proposed the possibility and the condition for achieving the opinion that child is the curriculum. From six sides appraised requests: teacher's and student's curriculum consciousness, curriculum goal, curriculum content, curriculum structure, curriculum implement. The requests of these aspects are the condition for realizing the opinion that child is the curriculum.