What are the opinions of schools in different courses?

The main schools of modern curriculum theory

(1) Subject-centered Curriculum Theory Subject-centered curriculum is the floorboard of the most traditional curriculum forms in various disciplines organized on the basis of cultural inheritance and science. It refers to selecting the content suitable for students' development stage from various sciences to form different disciplines, and arranging their order, learning hours and duration independently and side by side according to their own logic and system. Since school, the theory of subject-centered curriculum has been developed. With the change of social and political system and the development of production, science and technology, after long-term practice and research, a relatively systematic theory has gradually formed. In ancient China, Confucius (55 BC1~ 479 BC)' s "Six Arts" (Rites, Music, Shooting, Imperial, Calligraphy and Numerals) and "Four Qualities" (Poetry, Calligraphy and Rites) were introduced in the West, platon (427-347 BC) and Aristotle (388 BC). From the ancient Greek period to the European Renaissance, this theory has occupied a dominant position in the European school curriculum for more than 1500 years. After the Renaissance, capitalism rose, production, science and technology made great progress, broke through the shackles of religion, and education also made great progress. British educator Bacon (F. Bacon, 156 1 ~ 1626) first put forward that "knowledge is power", and schools should mainly teach natural science knowledge. Czech educator J.A. Comenius (1592 ~ 1670) advocated "pan-intellectualism", and put forward "teaching everyone everything" in his monograph On Great Teaching (1632), and established an encyclopedia. He believes that all the knowledge in the real world is useful and needed to cultivate "all-knowing and all-powerful" "intelligent successors" and should be included in the curriculum. German educator J.F.Herbart (1776 ~ 184 1 year) was the first person to provide a theoretical basis for psychology courses in the19th century. He believes in "intellectualism" and regards the development of people's "various interests" as one. He believes that six interests (experience, speculation, aesthetics, sympathy, society and religion) should be cultivated and corresponding courses should be set up respectively. For example, in order to cultivate speculative interest (interest in further thinking about "why" things), we should offer mathematics, logic, grammar and other disciplines to exercise students' thinking ability. Spencer (1820 ~ 1903), a British positivist philosopher and sociologist, played an important role in the development of subject-centered curriculum theory. From the utilitarian point of view, he advocated practical scientific knowledge, opposed the gentleman education curriculum or classical liberal arts middle school curriculum divorced from the reality of production and life, and advocated practical courses to meet the new needs of the bourgeoisie. This reflects the trend that science and production, science and education began to combine during the industrial revolution or the first technological revolution. Spencer believes that the function of education is to prepare people for a "full life". He said in the article "What knowledge is most valuable" (1859): "What knowledge is most valuable? The unanimous answer is science. This is a conclusion drawn from various aspects. " Science, as the curriculum content of the school, is also of the greatest value to students. Spencer also analyzed the so-called "enriching life" activities, divided them into five aspects, and arranged the disciplines accordingly. For example, the setting of mathematics, mechanics and other disciplines is to prepare for indirect self-survival activities, including making a living, making money, designing and producing. It is worth mentioning that Spencer's utilitarian education thought had a great influence on Perry, which promoted the emergence and development of the modernization movement of mathematics curriculum at the end of 19 and the beginning of the 20th century. The subject-centered curriculum theory has five advantages, namely: 1. According to the teaching materials organized by disciplines, people can be taught to master cultural heritage systematically; 2. Learning logical and orderly textbooks in an orderly way can fully develop people's intelligence; 3. Organize to teach and teach some basic knowledge and technical elements that meet the requirements of educational tasks; 4. With a long tradition, most teachers are used to it; 5. The composition of the course is relatively simple and easy to evaluate. The subject-centered curriculum theory also has its shortcomings, mainly as follows: 1. Because the teaching materials pay attention to the logic and systematicness of the subject, they often emphasize memory and ignore understanding when learning; 2. Emphasize the teaching of subject knowledge results, but ignore the teaching of methods and processes of acquiring knowledge. In this way, it is not conducive to stimulating students' interest in learning, mobilizing students' initiative in learning and cultivating students' ability to solve problems; 3. Because there are many subjects, it is difficult for students to synthesize and unify their learning knowledge; 4. The teaching methods are the same, and it is difficult to implement differentiated education. With the development of productive forces and the progress of science and technology, the research on curriculum theory is more in-depth, and the discipline-centered curriculum theory is constantly criticized, mainly because it easily leads to the disconnection between theory and practice and cannot meet the actual needs of society. Nevertheless, the theory of subject-centered curriculum still occupies an important position in European and American countries; In China, from ancient times to modern times, schools have always adopted the subject-centered curriculum. The entry of "course" in Encyclopedia of America says: "Subject course is a course that has never been replaced by other courses". This is in line with the facts. It can be seen that the influence of subject-centered curriculum is far-reaching, and its superior position and positive role can not be ignored.

(II) Child-centered Curriculum Theory The child-centered curriculum is a curriculum centered on children's subjective activities and experiences, that is, a curriculum composed of children's interests, needs and problems based on the choice and organization of learning experience, and its learning form is to solve problems through children's activities. Children-centered courses are also called activity-centered courses or experiential courses. The idea of child-centered curriculum theory can be traced back to 18 century French enlightenment thinker J.J.Rousseau (17 12 ~ 1778). He advocated "naturalism" and "natural education theory", and advocated adopting the educational method of "conforming to nature" to get rid of the influence of feudal rule and cultivate "natural people" The core of Rousseau's curriculum theory lies in the creative discovery of children's inherent naturalness. Education can't ignore children's nature and real life, and must follow children's "self-initiative" and adopt educational methods that adapt to children's "age development stage". Rousseau attached great importance to "direct experience" and even proposed that "there are no books outside the world and no teaching materials outside the facts". Rousseau's Emile puts forward the basic idea of activity-centered curriculum theory. Dewey (1859 ~ 1952), an American pragmatic philosopher, gave a systematic theoretical foundation to the child-centered curriculum. He believes that the traditional subject curriculum is subject-centered, unable to take care of children's needs and interests, and the subjects are too detailed and far from real life. He advocates that the content of education should be closely related to children's social life experience and proceed from children's interests and needs. Dewey once said: "The real center of school curriculum is not science, literature, history or geography, but children's own social activities." He objected to treating textbooks as "fixed and ready-made" and "things beyond children's experience". Special emphasis is placed on "learning by doing", such as activity homework, manual work, cooking, sewing, performance and experiment. He believes that the experience gained through such activities can adapt to social life, overcome the isolation of knowledge and provide children with a complete understanding of the world. So "activity" and "social life" here can be regarded as synonyms, that is, "education is life" and "school is society" as Dewey said. Dewey advocates that education is life, not preparation for life, so we should set the curriculum with children as the center, so that the curriculum can meet the current needs and interests of children. It can be said that the basic starting point of activity center curriculum is children's interest and motivation, and motivation is the center of teaching and curriculum setting. In his view, children have four instinctive motivations, namely, social motivation (the desire to be with other children), construction motivation (the desire to process raw materials and build all kinds of things), exploration motivation (the curiosity tendency and the desire to experiment) and expression motivation (the tendency to love to create and appreciate all kinds of art). The setting of activity center curriculum and the selection of teaching materials should focus on these motivations of children. Dewey's student W H kilpatrick (187 1 ~ 1965) founded the "design teaching method" (19 18), which fully embodies Dewey's child-centered curriculum theory. The so-called "design teaching" means that schools should educate students in planned activities. This kind of activity must be decided by the children themselves, and the children should make their own activity plans, carry out their own activities and evaluate their own effects. Children can acquire knowledge in design activities and cultivate their interests, abilities and various qualities. 19 19, the "progressive education association" was established, which made the child-centered curriculum widely popular in American primary and secondary schools and formed a national education reform movement that lasted for nearly 50 years. In old China, the "life education" advocated by Mr. Tao Xingzhi, the "integration of teaching" and the experiments in other experimental schools were based on the principles of "activity-centered curriculum" and "design teaching". After the founding of New China, this curriculum theory was criticized. However, during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, there appeared such practices as "organizing teaching with typical products" and "teaching driven by combat tasks", which were essentially the implementation of "activity-centered curriculum theory". Thus, the child-centered curriculum theory has the following advantages: 1 Starting from the issues that children are interested in, learning activities are active and lively; 2. Pay attention to the close connection between study and living environment, and absorb rich contents such as life, experience and social problems into the school curriculum, which is conducive to enriching the teaching content of the school; 3. Paying attention to learning in activities and experiences is conducive to cultivating students' problem-solving ability and physical and mental development. However, if the curriculum is set according to the child-centered curriculum theory, the following disadvantages will also appear: 1. The content of the course is limited to children's daily life experience, ignoring the cultural science created by predecessors, which is not conducive to mastering the necessary basic knowledge and skills; 2. Emphasis on the psychological structure of the curriculum, ignoring the knowledge system and scientific logical structure, is not conducive to students to master systematic scientific knowledge. On the surface, it aims to give full play to students' subjectivity, but in essence it limits the development of students' subjectivity; 3. Child-centered, easy to despise the social task of education. Although the child-centered curriculum theory has not been widely implemented, its value in curriculum theory is undeniable. In the lower grades of primary schools, appropriate use of activity courses in a certain period and within a certain range is very beneficial to arouse children's initiative and enthusiasm in learning, and also provides important enlightenment for primary and secondary schools and colleges to compile courses. In fact, there is no simple subject-centered curriculum theory and simple activity-centered curriculum theory in modern curriculum. Judging from the current teaching plan, there are both subject-centered courses and activity-centered courses (such as productive labor, internship and practice, social practice, military training and some craft courses), and these two curriculum theories are gradually absorbing each other, learning from each other's strengths and merging into the main guiding ideology of the current curriculum. Especially in our country's curriculum, while absorbing the reasonable connotation of activity-centered curriculum theory, we pay more attention to the combination of subject curriculum and activity curriculum. The National Education Commission 1992 promulgated the "Nine-year compulsory education full-time primary and junior high school curriculum program (Trial)", which has stipulated that the curriculum in China's compulsory education stage consists of two parts: disciplines and activities.

(3) Structuralist Curriculum Theory Structuralist curriculum theory emphasizes the knowledge structure as the center, and its representative figure is American psychologist and educator Jerome Bruner (19 15-). His curriculum theory is mainly about the syllabus and textbook structure, and advocates that the teaching content should be centered on the basic structure of each subject. The basic structure of a discipline refers to its basic concepts, principles, relationships and methods. Mastering the basic structure is convenient for students to know the facts and make classified evaluation, which is conducive to the consolidation of knowledge and the transfer of knowledge and skills. Structuralist curriculum theory pays more attention to the mastery of concepts, lists the procedures of structure, advocates the methods of making students acquire knowledge, and emphasizes that students can master knowledge and structure through discovery. This curriculum theory advocates that when compiling teaching materials, the development procedure of students' wisdom should be organically combined with the subject structure to promote the development of students' wisdom through the subject structure. Structuralism curriculum theory introduces structuralism principle and psychology theory into curriculum structure, which conforms to the theory of system science and has certain scientific value, and at the same time reflects the objective requirements of contemporary new technological revolution for talent training to some extent. However, because the guiding ideology of this curriculum theory is "elite education", it overestimates students' acceptance ability, overemphasizes theory, and ignores students' mastery of basic knowledge and training of basic skills. Although the theoretical expectation is very high, it has not achieved the expected effect after practical test in ordinary schools. This theory is suitable for students with higher ability, and may be more suitable for college teaching and more meaningful. In view of this, it is not surprising that the structuralist curriculum theory lacks universal applicability, especially for primary and secondary school students, and cannot achieve the expected results. However, this theory is of great reference significance to the teaching in colleges and universities and is worth further study.

(IV) Social Centrism Curriculum Theory Social Centrism curriculum emphasizes social life and social problems as the center, which is put forward to overcome the one-sidedness of child-centered curriculum theory. It advocates determining the basis of curriculum through the analysis of social problems, and does not advocate taking students' interests and motives as the starting point for compiling curriculum, but is in favor of breaking the boundaries of traditional subject curriculum. The method of breaking is not to organize curriculum with students' activities, but to take social reality as the core of curriculum design, so the society-centered curriculum is also called core curriculum.

Compared with subject-centered curriculum theory and activity-centered curriculum theory, social-centered curriculum theory came into being later. It came into being in the United States in 1930s, and it is divided into two schools: social adaptation school and social transformation school. They discussed their views from different angles. The school of social adaptation has opinions and views on the curriculum theory centered on society. Social change is the decisive factor of personal development, and the school is the agency of society, and society is constantly changing. Therefore, the curriculum, the choice of teaching content and the arrangement of teaching materials should serve the students, with the aim of making them understand and adapt to the changing world and gain a firm foothold in this world. Different from the school of social adaptation, the school of social transformation believes that society is constantly changing, and social life and social problems should be the core of the curriculum. Its purpose is not to adapt to the changing society, but to train students into tools to transform society, improve their initiative and consciousness, actively participate in social reform and play the role of reformers. Therefore, it requires setting courses according to the needs of social transformation, linking the selection and arrangement of courses and their contents with social transformation, and organizing school courses around the "central problem" of social transformation. The curriculum organization structure proposed by this theory is very unique and has the following characteristics: 1. The course structure is wheel-shaped, and the axis of the wheel represents some key issues. Spoke is a variety of courses consisting of discussion, knowledge and skills learning and vocational training. It is an important premise and support to explain and solve the key problems in the axle; 2. The tire unifies all courses related to axle problems, making this wheel organically linked. According to this unique structure, there are two main forms of courses: one is a life-oriented course, which focuses on life issues, and each activity does not have to be arranged in a continuous time. The guidance of a class is not given by a teacher, and this course emphasizes direct experience rather than the logical system of knowledge itself, and emphasizes personal research rather than systematic teaching by teachers. Therefore, the purpose of transforming society is not to learn all kinds of knowledge, but to transform society, transform tradition and comprehensively study all aspects of society; The other is the core curriculum, which is between the subject-centered curriculum and the activity-centered curriculum, breaking the boundaries of disciplines and combining two or three disciplines from practical problems. Generally, a teaching team composed of one teacher or several teachers teaches a class through a series of activities. Each teaching activity is carried out in a continuous unit time (such as 2 or 3 classes). Although the views of social adaptation school and social transformation school are different, they both emphasize social practice and social problem-solving ability, which is the real value and innovation of social-centered curriculum theory. Every theory has its rationality and advantages, and the theory of social-centered curriculum is no exception. Its main advantages are as follows: 1. Paying attention to the comprehensive study of various subjects, rather than studying in isolation according to different subjects, will help students master the methods to solve practical problems; 2. Pay attention to the relationship between education and society, curriculum and society, and set up courses according to the actual needs of society, which is conducive to serving the needs of society; 3. Students trained according to this theory have strong social adaptability. However, the social-centered curriculum theory also has its shortcomings, which are mainly manifested in the following points: First, it exaggerates the role of education and thinks that many social problems are caused by society and have nothing to do with other factors, but in fact it is impossible to solve all problems by education alone; Secondly, it ignores the systematicness of each subject and separates the relationship between them, which is not conducive to students mastering the systematic knowledge of each subject; Third, it overemphasizes social needs and ignores other factors that affect the curriculum. Therefore, the theory of social-centered curriculum is not a comprehensive and effective universal theory to solve curriculum problems, which needs further reform and improvement.