The Historical Thread and Analysis of Teacher Education Policy in the Past 70 Years of New China

Abstract

Since the founding of New China 70 years ago, China’s teacher education has experienced a historical evolution from an independent closed teacher education system to a multi-open teacher education system. Starting from the paradigm of historical institutionalism analysis, this paper explores the basic logic of the evolution of China’s teacher education policy. The study finds that: in terms of structure, the psychological model of political system, economic system and social culture is a deep structure that affects the evolution of teacher education policy; the control logic of centralized management and the thinking habit of planned economy have always been running through; in history, the reform of teacher education in China is more a product driven by external factors which is a top-down, government-led “mandatory institutional change”, showing a clear path-dependent color, but there are also system fine-tuning, conversion, replacement, and even major disruption. How to find the historical “veto point” of institutional change to break through the path dependence of the existing teacher education development is a major issue in the reform of Chinese teacher education.