The Reform Elite

Usually the set pattern of explanation for "legitimate knowledge" focuses on "class" and "ideology", which manifests the class nature & hidden ideology of curriculum, the correspondent inequality in education and the control feature by the combination of knowledge & state power. Meanwhile this dissertation, seeing from the actor's perspective, tries to examine what effect the actors, who are restricted by all real conditions, have brought about to "legitimate knowledge" in the course of the "law" is set and "determined". And this is the core attention of the dissertation.In details, two questions must be illustrated. On the one hand, are there some forces and means that cannot be generalized by "state control" & "class reproduction" but have set foot in the value orientated & practice process of the current curriculum reform? On the other hand, how on earth can the actors' ideas and practice be possible in the course the current curriculum reform? Accordingly what curriculum culture and control space has come into being?Often "legitimate knowledge" is constructed "in advance" by policy makers and its implementers. The constructed course as well as the actors do not show their true color until the curriculum is required to be reformed and reconstructed. This is why the dissertation regards the current curriculum reform as a case. Unfolding the social factors & their relationships and giving prominence to the actor's perspective whose speech, consciousness, will & practice are focused on, the author argues that the social factors must be melted into the real & vivid actors so that their influence on curriculum knowledge can be manifested really, integratedly and deeply.The actors, restricted by all sorts of conditions, come from multi-source, different fields and alternative directions. So the analysis based on the actor's perspective must be dynamical and complicated. Here are both the possibility of control & reproduction and the confliction of diverse forces, both the submission & compromise to the given order and the confusion & effort with the individual's enthusiasm, both the persistence & alienation of seeking and the strategy & wisdom of adaptation. As a result the final forces are multi-direction and complicated. And the author argues it is more a force space full of tension than a kind of force.The view position of this dissertation is post-criticism, i.e. how to insist on, think over and tell the possibility which has already been criticized and deconstructed? Seeing from the conflict between theory and practice, as well as the confronting by "to be" and "ought to be", the author tries to find out some shift, strategy and possibility in the real predicament of "cannot but". This is resulted from both the abundance of the actors themselves and the research mission of deconstruction and reconstruction. Based on all this the author explores the possible space of the reform actors who are in the order of politics, ideas, market and legitimation. And also some groups of concepts appear in the dissertation: individual character and normative order, pretext politics, unspoken text and idea order, extension of legitimation.