本文是一篇英国硕士的课程Assignment范文,全文2000字，可以做为英国留学生的参考资料使用，本文由硕博论文网原创提供，转载请注明出处，谢谢。
The purpose of colonization is profit. In order to better obtain this benefit, colonists often place their hopes on education, hoping that education will cultivate loyal executives for colonists in the local area.Rogoff argues that the colonizers' methods of enlightenment (including childhood education) were rarely used to help the colonized peoples and regions, but only to serve the economic or military interests of the nations where the missionaries or teachers belonged(York, 2021).
The purpose of colonization is profit. In order to better obtain this benefit, colonists often place their hopes on education, hoping that education will cultivate loyal executives for colonists in the local area.Rogoff argues that the colonizers' methods of enlightenment (including childhood education) were rarely used to help the colonized peoples and regions, but only to serve the economic or military interests of the nations where the missionaries or teachers belonged(York, 2021).
Although contemporary early childhood education has changed and evolved significantly from before, there is no denying the fact that there are also serious challenges to traditional national values in the field of early education in developing countries. From a postcolonial perspective, there are still unequal relationships in early childhood education.
A discussion in the 1920s and 1930s focused on the wholesale Westernization of curriculum content and educational methods in domestic kindergartens at that time. Some early childhood education practitioners by then believed that foreign (especially European and American) models of early childhood education were good preschool models. Similar arguments still exist today. For example, a city kindergarten advertised itself as an international kindergarten, providing pure water for baths and imported decorative materials. Some kindergartens advertise that they teach in a foreign language and that the mother tongue is only a second language. In the minds of these founders, foreign languages (e.g., English, French, Spanish) are better than the domestic language. Children who grow up in this situation may not speak the local language well.
As globalization increases, foreign cultures are gradually entering all areas of people's lives, and intercultural exchange seems to be turning into cultural substitution, which indicates the potential existence of colonization, a kind of hidden cultural colonization. Consider a conversation that took place in a kindergarten. The middle class of a kindergarten is carrying out the theme activity of "what do I like". "Children, who can tell the teacher what you like best?" Before the teacher's gentle words were out of her mouth, the children were scrambling to report: "I like eating McDonald's and KFC the most! "I like to wear Mickey and Babadook!" "I like Barbie and watermelon taro!" When children's interests are directed to non-ethnic products, kindergarten corners inevitably introduce content from these exotic cultures. On this basis, there are also attempts to introduce this exotic culture into teaching materials. For example, a publisher and an audio-visual company published and distributed the textbook "English for Young Children" (for kindergarten classes), which has four units, of which "McDonald's" is the second unit(Fleer & B Van Oers, 2018). It is expected that these textbooks will have more educational content that reflects Western life, and these Western-specific contents usually imply Western values, thus children will be unconsciously influenced by Western values.
While it is easy to identify formal Western orientations, it is not so easy when it comes to values, especially when traditional cultural content and educational approaches are gradually weakened and learning content and approaches that reflect Western values are often hidden and not easily perceived by educators and learners.There are also differences in educational processes and evaluation between Eastern and Western cultures. Influenced by modern early childhood education theories, the preschool community places great emphasis on children's play and, on this basis, on inquiry-based learning, which is believed to facilitate the development of children's subjectivity. In contrast, traditional indoctrination teaching in some Eastern countries (including China) is considered to be detrimental to children's physical and mental development and not conducive to the development of their subjectivity(Lash &Raimbekova, 2020). Take the example of a child opening a hotel room door for the first time: mainstream Western child education theory advocates that, children try and find their own way to unlock the door; whereas in the traditional Eastern culture, children are usually given a one-time task to open the door directly. Adults usually give children the direct method of opening a lock all at once and then allow them to practice. When the American scholar Gardner observed this phenomenon, he was puzzled at first, but eventually realized that the two cultural orientations inevitably led to a different culture of schooling. The Western culture, which encourages children to explore and experiment in any way, can sometimes create violent behaviors, resulting in violence in American schools; while in contrast, the Eastern culture, which encourages children to embrace traditional culture, helps maintain and pass on social values, so violence in schools is rare. The prevailing international theory of early childhood education is simply a wholesale rejection of overly traditional early childhood education and a worship of Western inquiry-based learning (Dorothy Aguilera-Black Bear &Tippeconnic, 2015).
A similar situation arises in the choice of teaching methods and the organization of classroom life, mainly in terms of group instruction and teacher-child ratios. According to Western teacher-child ratio theory, group instruction has a number of shortcomings, such as too little space per child and too few opportunities for children to interact with teachers(GakiiMurungi, 2018). Early childhood education policies based on this theory have been mechanistic in that they have simply graded kindergartens according to class size and classroom space. In his discussion of colonialism, Mr. Fei Xiaotong said that the old missionaries, though not always malicious themselves, considered their culture to be better than the local's, wishing to pass on the "good" to the "bad". They divide culture into the superior and inferior, and want the "inferior" to follow the "superior"(Dessein, 2019). In today’s early childhood education field, there is also the difference between “good” and “bad”, and a large number of researchers and practitioners subconsciously refer to "Western" as the good. To a certain extent, this may lead to the loss of traditional cultural values.
When the cultural realm is dominated by the West while ignoring cultural traditions, a new form of colonization has already existed.In a sense, the modern educational system itself is a permanent wedge of Western colonialism into the cultural traditions of the colonized countries. Through this wedge, the Western world successfully intervened in the power structure of the cultural transmission and innovation system of the colonized countries and the Third World societies as a whole (Smallwood et al., 2021). For Third World countries, the globalization of education has meant more the introduction of educational experiences and models from developed Western countries, while their own educational and cultural traditions have faced a crisis in this historical process. The break in the cultural transmission of early childhood education already illustrates the presence of colonial forms in the cultural sphere.
This phenomenon, also known as self-colonization, refers to the active participation of the Third World in its own Orientalization. In discussing the colonial character of basic education, one researcher says, "A little deeper examination of our primary and secondary education shows that Western cultural hegemony is fully reflected in everything from the content and methods of teaching to the basic educational philosophy. This is no less true in academic societies such as China and most Eastern countries." (An & Zhu, 2018) In fact, this phenomenon is also prevalent in the field of early childhood education. Under the influence of Western preschool thinking, some theoreticians have continued to be influenced by the modern European and American discourse systems, and through the efforts of various parties, have constructed a system of so-calledcorrected view of education, withthe correct view of curriculum as its core. They have also called for the translation of theory into practice as teachers' daily educational and teaching behaviors. Those who hold this view believe in the existence of a universal child, preschool education, and kindergarten curriculum, demanding that the scientific laws of child development be followed and that children be nurtured according to the correct philosophy.
In fact, the issue of colonization and post-colonization in early childhood education has long been a source of reflection for scholars in the field of education. People need to look at both the positive aspects of colonialism and the realities of one's own development.
Fundamentally, the old colonialism undoubtedly left a very unpleasant memory for the colonized people, but while criticizing colonialism, there is no denying its relatively positive significance. For Marx, colonization should be a dialectical issue, in the subjective sense of the Western countries, whose aim was to gain profit, thus causing destruction, especially cultural destruction to the colonized countries (Gibson, 2020). On the other hand, colonization was constructive in the sense that it provided opportunities for the development of the colonized countries and contributed to the change of their traditions. For example, the early kindergartens from Japan and the subsequent European and American kindergartens opened the eyes of preschool educators in mainland China and provided new ideas for early preschool educators.
Postcolonial theory is based on Foucault's postmodern theory, which emphasizes the dismantling of Western hegemony, namely the realization of decolonization (Wang et al., 2019). In Said's view, decolonization is a very complex battle that necessarily involves different political destinies, different histories and geographies, and is full of fictional, academic, and anti-academic works. Said argues that nationalism should not be characterized in general terms, but should be seen to play an important role in the decolonization of Eastern peoples, while critiquing narrow nationalism, chauvinism, fundamentalism, racism, etc. (Nzewi&Maramura, 2021). This means that decolonization should be a path of cultural development that is different from purely narrow nationalism and that is locally grown and culturally created based on national realities. Therefore, decolonization in early childhood education is definitely not a narrow nationalism, and it is certainly not the absence of a national spirit. It should be both open and insistent, maintaining exchanges and dialogue with other cultures as openness, and at the same time maintaining national positions and cultural traditions.
Different cultures have their own strengths and weaknesses in their perspectives on early childhood education. At present, the vast majority of Western child development researchfocuses on abstract and generalized children, rather than on children living in specific social life environments. The mainstream of this kind of development theory penetrates into the field of preschool education research, and is characterized by repulsive penetration, that is, people's daily activities and specific living environment areexcluded from the development of psychological behavior. Such research ignores the essence of human cultural life. This is not necessarily true in the view of human culture researchers.For example, a horizontal comparison between mother-child activities of different ethnic groups is made, and it is found that under different cultural backgrounds, there are obvious differences in how society views children and how they are taught.Such differences can hardly be used to prove which culture is superior and which is inferior. Because these cultural orientations are not comparable, there is no difference in what they hope to achieve. The exchange between cultures should thus be a two-way street, not a one-way flow. In other words, we must appreciate not only our own culture but also the culture of other nations from the heart; we must not judge the merits of other nations' cultures by the standards of our own, and determine what is dross and what is refinement. Each nation's early education has its own special characteristics and should respect its national traditions. Only in this way will early childhood education achieve a beautiful ecology of harmony and diversity.
In today's era of global economic and cultural integration, simply emphasizing narrow national isolation is certainly against the tide.However, in terms of early education curriculum reform, the Eastern countries should not follow the values of some Westerners and behave like Westerners. It's more about what their own people should do.It is time for educators to think and act on this issue, otherwise children will become the subject of other cultures. Of course, this is to remind every scholar and practitioner of the importance of this issue.
References
An, N., & Zhu, H. (2018). Conceptual and theoretical debates in modern geopolitics and their implications for Chinese geopolitics. Area Development and Policy, 3(3), 368-382.
Dessein, B. (2019). Confucianisms for a Changing World Cultural Order ed. by Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock. Journal of Chinese Religions, 47(1), 87-90.
Dorothy Aguilera-Black Bear, &Tippeconnic, J. (2015). Voices of resistance and renewal : indigenous leadership in education. University Of Oklahoma Press.
Fleer, M., & B Van Oers. (2018). International handbook of early childhood education. Springer.
GakiiMurungi, C. (2018). Does a teacher/pupil ratio influence teaching of mathematics in pre-schools? International Journal of Pregnancy & Child Birth, 4(6). https://doi.org/10.15406/ipcb.2018.04.00133
Gibson, N. C. (2020). Fanon and Marx revisited. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 51(4), 320-336.
Lash, M., &Raimbekova, L. (2020). A modern-day early childhood teacher education initiative on Tajikistan’s historic silk road: Dushanbe to the roof of the world. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 42(1), 76–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/10901027.2020.1746935 http://www.sblunwen.com/dxassignment/
Nzewi, O. I., &Maramura, T. C. (2021). A big picture perspective of the decolonization of public administration debate in africa: looking back and looking forward. South African Journal of Higher Education, 35(5), 204-215.
Smallwood, R., Woods, C., Power, T., & Usher, K. (2021). Understanding the impact of historical trauma due to colonization on the health and well-being of Indigenous young peoples: A systematic scoping review. Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 32(1), 59-68.
Wang, B., Schlagwein, D., Cecez-Kecmanovic, D., &Cahalane, M. C. (2019). Beyond Bourdieu, Foucault and Habermas: Review and Assessment of Critical Information Systems Research.
York, A. (2021). Sensing when to colonize. Nature Reviews Microbiology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-021-00609-5