A Comparative Study Of Senior High School’s Human Geography Textbook’s Value Orientation

“Geography in different levels of education can be a dynamic,functional and interesting subject, and contributes to a lifelongappreciation and understanding about the world.” From this sentenceof “geography education international charter”, the value of moderngeography education can be seen. After entering the21st century,geography course is set to face a huge challenge and test. Thecontinuous development and progress of society, economy, cultureand science and technology, force China’s geography curriculum andtextbooks to keep pace with the time’s change, and to adapt to thedevelopment of the time. Geography textbooks’ value orientation alsoquietly changes, and the knowledge of human geography is moresubjective and more tendentious than natural geography. It is animportant carrier of transfer value orientation. What kind of valueorientation of knowledge was elected to the textbook to build in thehigh school geography curriculum, become the focus of people.This paper chooses People’s Education Press’2000version and2004version of high school human geography textbook as theresearch object, and uses literature method, statistical method,comparative method, and the text analysis method to study. On the basis of summarizing the predecessors’ studies, through detailedcomparison of two sets of textbooks’ written guiding ideology andbasis, content structure and content construction, column setup(including introductory words, content feeds, the text content andunit operations section), the text (including written characters, thetext language features, text space, case space, logic structure of thetext and images), this paper compares and analysis two versions oftextbooks’ value orientation, and aims to study the changes of valueorientation. By comparison, high school human geography textbook’svalue orientation’s changes are shown as follows:Firstly, the value orientation of individualism tends to be obvious;however, the value orientation of social standard is no longer the first.More and more attention of students is emphasized. It pays attentionto the subjectivity of the students and the students’ own developmentand lifelong development. Curriculum is made up around the students’needs and interests, and accomplishes the ultimate goal of individualdevelopment and perfection.Secondly, it emphasizes that the value orientation of knowledgeshould mix into daily life, and insists on geography education return tolives of students, rather than the value orientation of knowledgestandard. If geography education stays away from the practice of lifeand the student’s specific situation, students’ knowledge will stayonly in the theory stage, and can not been applied in practice.Therefore, geographical education’s returning to life is an inevitablevalue orientation. The education of returning to "life" is a kind ofeducation which faces with students’ the new life. The2004editiontextbook emphasizes the link between geographical knowledge andreal life, and pays attention to cultivating and training students’ geographical skills and abilities in the learning process. It also thestudying of geography that is useful to life, and emphasizes that thegeography knowledge which is learned can lay a foundation and offerhelp for their later life and development.Thirdly, it emphasizes the value orientation of students’ globalviews. New curriculum standard emphasizes that students buildglobal value system and break through the narrow nationalism, sogeography textbooks begin to pay attention to cultivate citizens ofthe world, and let the students not only focus on the country and thepeople’ geographic problems, but more focus on global geographicalproblems, and adhere to the concept of sustainable development ofthe entire planet.