A Study On The Patterns Of Relationship Between Specialty And Course In Higher Education

The paper presents two different patterns of relation between specialty and course, specialty-provision-course pattern and course-communicating-specialty pattern. Specialty under the pattern of specialty is a certain educational unit, where course is attached to specialty; specialty under the pattern of course is one unit made up with some courses, where courses are cells to form the specialty.There exist different educational values in various times and areas, emphasizing particularly on any one of two basic functions, so the degrees which specialty and course are influenced by the subject and career differ greatly. Such examples could be multiplied with Peking University and Harvard University in the article , to compare with two patterns on the three views :ideas, systems and operations. The educational ideas initiated by two countries, which leads to the differences between manageable systems for the specialty and course. So during the process of operating two patterns , there exist great characters in the aspects respectively which concern the specialty setting power, the specialty character, the methods of taking courses, the creation of new specialty, the course catalogue and the teaching plan, etc. After having analyzing the ideas and comparing all kinds of realistic statistics, it has been concluded that the pattern of specialty is not prior as course in the field of meeting social needs and cultivating creation. Fortunately, the large-scale and successful reforms on the pattern of specialty have already been undertaken in our country, including: delegating power of specialty setting, arranging patterns and rates of courses, promoting the trial of credit system and enrollment and training of students in large category. Judging from the statements above, the author looks ahead for the reforms of specialty pattern and puts forward measures focused on the course and specialty reforms.