Title: Ideology and Practice: a decade of change and continuity in contemporary Chinese education
Abstract: Strenuous efforts have been made to change the course of Chinese education over the last decade. During this period two major sets of ideologies have been presented and, in the last year or two, further emendations have appeared in attempts to make the school system more responsive to perceived needs. This paper concerns itself principally with the two sets of ideology and practice: pre-1977, during the Cultural Revolution; and post-1976, during the Hua Guofeng administration. It also looks at changes in the 1980s. Special attention is given to ideology, the expansion of schooling, self-reliance, the utilisation of human resources, and the emergence of pressure groups. It argues that a growing self-confidence among policy-makers in Chinese education has permitted a wider range of alternative strategies to emerge under a broadly interpreted ideology. With this has come a willingness to take up ideas from the past. The first 'set' of ideology and practice comes from the Cultural Revolution dated from 1966 to 1976. From the late 1960s, attempts were made to give the battle-cries of the Red Guards an institutional form. The period, which took its clue from the slogan 'struggle-criticism-transform' [1], is now regarded as a time of ultra-left influence in education. Officially nothing affirmative is said of it, although it is recognised that some Chinese educationists made individual contributions then. The second 'set' of ideology and practice is based on the immediate priorities post-1976, mainly under Chairman Hua Guofeng, when schooling took on an unashamedly academic character. While the new aims of education were slower to appear than the new practices, they soon reflected the revised priorities. In an important sense, the ideology and practice of the years to 1980 were a reaction against the policies of the Cultural Revolution. Over the last two years or so educational policy has taken a more adventurous form whose ancestry lies both sides of the 1976 watershed.
Publication Year: 1984
Publication Date: 1984-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 6
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