The word "curriculum" first appeared in the Tang and Song Dynasties in China. In the Tang Dynasty, Kong Ying Da explained the sentence "Yi Yi sleeps in the temple, and the gentleman makes it" in the Song of Xiaoya: "Maintaining the curriculum, the gentleman must supervise it, which is in line with the legal system." But the meaning of the course here is far from what we use today. In Song Dynasty, Zhu mentioned courses many times in On Zhuzi's Complete Books, such as "wide deadlines, tight courses" and "small courses, great efforts". Although he did not clearly define the "course" here, his meaning was clear, that is, homework and its process. The "course" here only refers to the arrangement order and regulations of learning content, and does not involve teaching requirements. It is more accurate to call it "learning course". In modern times, due to the implementation of the class teaching system and the introduction of the "five-stage teaching method" of Herbart School, people began to pay attention to teaching procedures and design, so the meaning of the course changed from "learning course" to "tutoring course". After liberation, due to the influence of pedagogy in Kailov, the word "curriculum" rarely appeared before the mid-1980s.
In the western English-speaking world, the word "course" first appeared in Spencer, a British educator. "(1859). It comes from Latin" currere ",which means" racetrack ". According to this etymology, the most common definition of curriculum is "learning curriculum", referred to as learning curriculum. This explanation is very common in various English dictionaries, such as Oxford Dictionary in Britain, Weber Dictionary in America and International Education Dictionary. However, this explanation is increasingly questioned in today's curriculum literature, and a new understanding of the Latin etymology of the curriculum has been gained. The noun form of the word "currere" means "racetrack", from which courses are designed for different students, which leads to the traditional curriculum system; The verb form of "currere" refers to "running", so that the focus of understanding the curriculum will be on the uniqueness of individual knowledge and the self-construction of experience, and completely different curriculum theory and practice will be obtained.
To sum it up. Curriculum refers to the total number of subjects that school students should study and its process and arrangement. In a broad sense, curriculum refers to the sum of educational contents and processes selected by schools to achieve their training goals, including various disciplines handed in by schools and purposeful and planned educational activities. A course in a narrow sense refers to a certain subject.
Second, the development of curriculum connotation
1. The course is a textbook.
Traditionally, the course content has always been regarded as the knowledge that students want to acquire, emphasizing the transfer of knowledge to students, and the transfer of knowledge is based on teaching materials. Therefore, the course content naturally becomes the teaching material used in the classroom. This is the embodiment of a discipline-centered view of educational purpose.
The orientation of teaching materials is based on the knowledge system, which holds that the course content is what students want to learn, and the carrier of knowledge is teaching materials, represented by Comenius.
2. Courses are activities
Dewey is the main representative of this course. Dewey believes that "the biggest drawback of curriculum is that it does not communicate with children's lives, and the center of interaction between disciplines is not science, but children's own social activities." By studying adult activities, we can identify various social needs and turn them into curriculum goals, and then further turn these goals into students' learning activities. This orientation focuses on what students do, not the subject system embodied in the textbook. Activity-oriented curriculum pays attention to the connection between curriculum and social life and emphasizes students' initiative in learning, which is a kind of inquiry teaching.
3. Curriculum is experience.
In Taylor's view, the course content is learning experience, and learning experience refers to the interaction between students and the external environment. He believes that "the basic means of education is to provide learning experience, not to show students all kinds of things." This view emphasizes that students are active participants, students are the main body of learning activities, and the quality and quantity of learning depend on students rather than courses, emphasizing the interaction between students and the external environment. The teacher's duty is to construct various situations suitable for students' abilities and interests, so as to provide meaningful experiences for each student.