National History Curriculum Standards In China And The United States Is A Comparative Study

To get to know history education of one country, it is a good way to start from curriculum standard, with which people can be clear about the basic regulations of the country's subject education, and people can master the country's curriculum management model which is inflected in subject education. This article illustrates the compare and analysis between China's modern history subjects standard issued in new century and the national history curriculum standard of USA in 1990's. Meanwhile, the author puts forward her own viewpoint on some problems existed in China's current history curriculum standard.The article consists of three chapters.Chapter One China's History Curriculum Standard in New Century This chapter describes the skeleton of China's history curriculum and history syllabus since its liberation and foundation in 1949. The chapter illustrates the history curriculum standard in new century, analyzes the characteristics of China's history curriculum standard and the problems: history curriculum standard of new century presented the education philosophy of " with the students' development as core"; it breaks the dynasty system of history courses; facilitates the diversification of the students' learning way. But the standard over-emphasized the education philosophy while it is not clearly stated in practical operation; there is problem in the link between the history curriculum standard of junior middle school and senior middle school.Chapter Two The National History Curriculum Standard of USAThis chapter discusses the development situation of history curriculum since foundation of USA, then it comments the national history curriculum standard of 1990's. On that basis, characteristics and problems are summarized on the structure and content of national history curriculum standard. Its national history curriculum standard takes the difference between students' intelligence & knowledge development level and curriculum content into account. It over-emphasizes the culture of students' ability. But its standard main content breaks the tradition of lecturing chronicle in chronological order, with theme as lecturing object, cut the continuity of history development. And the standard especially emphasizes the social practicability.Chapter Three The Differences and Similarities between the National History Curriculum Standard of China and USAThe chapter discusses the similarities and differences between the national history curriculum standards of the two countries: in structure, both include introduction, content study standard, implementation proposal and appendix. In main content, both give importance to citizen education, strengthenthe cultivation of students' ability. The differences are: in structure, the standard of USA is divided into two parts: the standard of kindergarten to Grade 4 and Grade 5-12 for the history of USA and world history, it is "a big history education" with the history as focus and knowledge of social courses. But in China's standard, in curriculum system of junior middle school," block-theme" is adapted, in that of senior middle school, "block" model is adapted with selective course and required course. In main content, USA adapts the language of "description", but in China, the description of content is not authentic. Meanwhile, the author puts forward her own views: whether to give up the history curriculum system completely or not; whether to make curriculum, which is an operable standard, more clear or not; study comment shall be based on reality, not on emptiness.How to perfect China's history curriculum standard is an issue to be further discussed. This article illustrates and gives its own views. In curriculum reform, we should pay attention to the reform worldwide, learn and use good result of other countries, which is key theory topic for China's basic education reform.