Harmonious Olympic Education School-based Curriculum Development And Implementation

It is commonly agreed that moral education in our schooling has been perceived not to be adequately targeted and therefore less effective. The core content of the Olympic Games, it is believed, is a kind of education, and the idea of the Olympic Games is imbued with the educative value in that there is an outlook on life that emphasizes harmonious development, a view of society pursuing equity and respect, a world view that seeks peace, a view of values that aims at justice and honesty, a view of environment that calls for sustainable development, and a view of sportsmanship that values participation. All of these ideas embody the commonly pursued values of the humankind—a kind of spiritual food that is indispensable for people of modern times. It is our view that the success in winning the chance of sponsoring the Olympics Games of 2008 in Beijing presents our school moral education with an important opportunity and/or a platform, and it commands our serious consideration of how to make good advantage of this opportunity.The idea of "the humanistic Olympic Games" represents the core idea of the Olympic Games of Beijing in 2008, in which harmony is the soul. In Zhongguancun No. 4 Primary School where the author is teaching, practical research has been conducted, utilizing the ideas of the harmonious Olympic Games as the school-based curriculum. In this research, the development and implementation of the school-based curriculum making use of ideas of the harmonious Olympic Games are considered one of the important tasks in improving the effectiveness of moral education. The research is based on the theory of Olympic ideas, humanistic education, the theory of school-based curriculum, the cognitive theory of peace education, and the theory of mental health education. The research methods used in the research are literature-based, together with the action research method, the comparative method, and the case study method. The curriculum objectives are many-fold: knowledge education about the Olympic Games, so that the students involved have a feeling of divinity, beauty, and dignity of the Olympic Games; the education in the spirits of the Olympic Games, such as friendship first, emphasis on involvement, equitable competition, the pursuit of excellence, respect for the winners, transcendence of the self, etc; the cultivation in our children of being identified with and developing the outstanding Chinese culture, respect for and knowing the cultures, spirits, manners and customs in other nations, nationalities, and regions; learning about and mastery of skills in communicating and socializing in a equitable and harmonious way with people in other nations, ethnicities, and areas. The curriculum content involves the following dimensions: the Olympic education, the education in civilized etiquettes, education in international understanding, peace education, environmental education, and mental health education. In terms of curriculum design, we pay great attention to "the experiences in the activities, the insights into the experiences, and internalization of the insights". The approaches to the implementation of the school-based curriculum take many and various forms: such as the integration of the harmonious Olympic education with moral education, school culture, curriculum development, mental health education, teaching in various school subjects, activities in international exchanges, etc., so that a complete curricular system of school moral education that suits the needs of our school has been constructed. In this way, we have enormously promoted moral education in our school in the direction of being more scientific, regular and school-based, thus increasingly improving quality education in our school to an ever higher level.