| Children’s literature is an essential part for Chinese language and literature textbooks for primary education, and has always been a main focus for education professionals, as well as educators and schoolteachers of this subject. But an absence of child-centeredness seemed to appear in children’s literature selected for these textbooks for primary schools. I focused on the importance of child-centeredness, and made a comprehensive case study of the textbooks by People’s Education Press. The analysis showed such absence in the following aspects, that is, the lack of resources in children’s literature, the lack of perspectives from children, and the loss of literary quality due to an over-emphasis of moral values. I employed the theory of schemas of cognitive psychology, reception aesthetics and the “new curriculum†standard, and analyzed the causes of such absence with our teaching practice underconsideration. The causes are education patterns aimed purely at examinations, the textbook compilers’ inaccurate perception of children, as well as the low literacy for children’s literature among teachers.With these analyses, I proposed child-centeredness in primary schools’ Chinese education, and put forward criteriaand principles for selecting children’s literature for such textbooks. The criteriasuggest, that we respect for children and their naivety, that our textbooks be designed in accordance with children’s language competence, and be interesting and appealing to children. And our principles suggest, that the selected texts be diversified and attracting, and adopt perspectives from children. Besides, the selections should be made in accordance with children’s language competence and come mainly from classics. |
