Research On "Formalization" Tendency In Elementary And Secondary School Ceremonies

Ceremony itself is a set of fixed, non-utilitarian, and replicable behaviors which surpasses the real life and comes out from long-term practices of human beings, as well as an active provided with sanctity and meaning expression function. In reality, ceremonies have been involved in every field of life and school ceremonies also arose in such circumstance. A school ceremony is a set of replicable and stylized activities with symbolic meaning expression function and fixed forms, which is conducted in school fields with the view of accomplishing certain education purposes. It is also a significant means for schools’moral education and comprises "ceremonial behaviors", ceremonies, and etiquettes of schools. Demonstration of a school ceremony further consists of static elements such as stage set, procedure and so on, and dynamic elements such as subjective participations of students and so on. The "formalization" tendency emerged in school ceremonies means the phenomenon that school ceremonies fails to express their internal meanings due to improper demonstrations of external forms (including scenes and procedure), which is embodied as neglect to external forms of ceremonies in their demonstrations and makes school ceremonies exist in name only.A school ceremony has moral education functions such as standardization, value guidance, and group identification, forms a huge "meaning field" during the demonstration process by its external symbols, and achieves the purpose of moral education of schools by students’subjective participations and experiencing of the meanings and values that it intends to express. However, with the generation of "formalization" tendency in school ceremonies, the external symbols (such as scenes, procedure, etc.) are destroyed, which disenables the expressions of intended meanings and values of school ceremonies and therefore weakens the moral education functions thereof. Meanwhile, school ceremonies are virtual symbolic expression behaviors which become into pretended and hollow actives under the conditions that the symbols are damaged and meanings and values can not be expressed. Moreover, morality educators are repeating those hollow and pretended actives ceaselessly, which makes students begin to resist or even hate those school ceremonies emotionally and causes great moral distrust to schools’moral education itself as well.Participators of school ceremonies, including students and teachers, all hold "formalization" thoughts to school ceremonies to certain extents, which roots in that political ideology always presents throughout school ceremonies and takes the initiative in school ceremony demonstrations, while students are indifferent and ignorant to political ideology in real life practices, so this conflict directly disenables students to experience things related to political ideology in school ceremonies vividly, makes them uninterested in or even averse to school ceremonies, and brings about helplessness of teachers encountering those reactions of students; therefore so called "formalization" tendency in school ceremonies emerges naturally.The value orientation for improvement to school ceremonies of middle and primary schools lies in regression to sublimity of ceremonies and promotion of emotional experience of students. Meanwhile, aiming at the root cause of the "formalization" tendency in school ceremonies, it is proposed to conduct "political ceremonies" and "non-political ceremonies" in schools separately and break through the situation that confuses political education with moral education in schools’general moral education, so as to make objectives and responsibilities of each department in general moral education clear and alleviate boredom of students to political education, therefore to maximize the function of each part of education orderly and achieve expected moral education objectives of school ceremonies.