Politics and history curriculum reform in post-Mao China

In post-Mao China, wide-ranging reform programmes have affected almost every sphere of life. History education has been no exception, and in addition to attempts to revise teaching, learning and assessment methods, there have been preliminary forays into textbook pluralism and gradual devolution of curriculum development. History education professionals, however, are fully cognisant of their subjectʹs ‘sensitivity’, and reforming goals and content of both the preactive and active curriculum has thus been a cautious endeavour. This chapter explores the progress of reform through the ‘officially authorised’ historical narratives and teaching goals specified in national curricula. It focuses primarily on the junior secondary curriculum, as primary school History has recently been absorbed by Social Studies, and senior secondary education is neither compulsory nor universally accessible. It is argued that while curriculum objectives and syllabus content remain largely circumscribed by ‘traditional’ views of history as moral-ideological education and by contemporary political imperatives, curriculum developers are also influenced by professional academic and pedagogical concerns, and by efforts to justify the status of History in an increasingly crowded curriculum.