The Power Of Silence

According to the clue of the reaction between teachers and the state, the dissertation elaborates that how teachers respond to the control of the basic state in schools. Seeing that the "state-society" frame could probably submerge the special social structure of China featured by "differential mode of association", the dissertation is conducted by means of "process-event" based on sociology of culture.School space is a web interlocked with powers, in which the state empowers its agent in the grass-root base. In this complicated web teachers, to some extent, become "strangers" since they are continually professionalized by teaching & researching, administered through the grade as a unit and supervised by their social memory of being "engineers of human being's souls". However facing such complicated web of powers, teachers show different actions by means of time transformation and space colonization, which draws support from discourses, bodies and public opinions, etc. All this means that though the teacher is a relatively silent but cannot be neglected force. School life is a section of society and so the problems occurring in the social transformation will also take place in schools. As a case, the phenomenon of "substitute-teachers" in public schools shows that the influence of the "unit system" on substitute-teaching action. It exposes the flaw of the "state-society" frame used for Chinese society analysis and expresses the important functions of cultural on teacher actions.The author takes culture as an analytic tool when studying how the state control teachers and how the latter react, especially taking "substitute-teachers" as an example. Thus sociology of culture could be an attempt to surmount the predicament of "structure-action" analysis when the "state-society" frame is used for explaining Chinese society. Culture may be an interpretation of meaning, a way of thinking or a way of living. The dissertation is based on the foundation of multi-understanding of culture. Depending on cultural analysis, the author tries to make dialogues in the process of crossing borders, which includes dialogues between the state & teachers, structure & culture, localization & globalization, problem sense & theory research. All this tries to expand from sociology of education to social theories of education.