Research on School Educational Reform from the Perspective of Complexity Science

School educational reform is a complicated and systematic project which requires us to study in a way of nonlinear thinking. School educational reform must pursue democracy and social justice as its moral responsibility and train students to be culture adaptors with critical awareness, educated people and problem-solvers with creativity. It should take actual problems into consideration to adopt non-coercive measures to make all people voluntarily take part in reform. Reformers should play a dual role in individualism and collectivism and maintain moderate tension between centralization and decentralization. Keywords—school, school education, reform, complexity I. SCHOOL EDUCATIONAL REFORM: A COMPLICATED AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH PERSPECTIVE The current reform on school education encounters mounting difficulties. It is urgent to advance overall educational reform to promote healthy development of schools. Under the guidance of complexity theory advocated by postmodern philosophy, the overall educational reform should transform from simple thinking with linear, order and manipulative characteristics into complexity thinking with nonlinear, creation and self-organized characteristics. The reasons why various measures for educational reform launched in traditional school education fail is the extreme conservation of the system of school education. In conservative system, the way to treat education by organizational system, teachers' training, teaching and management and government decision makers is easy to maintain status quo. Or "our school educational reform and practice is experiencing a difficult battle without any achievements in the end. The solution is more about climbing to anther peak to see the whole view which means that a new thinking mode should be used in school educational reform than climbing to the peak to introduce more and better reform measures"[1]. Such new thinking mode is the complexity one which holds that the cause-effect relationship is non-linear and hard to trace back, thus there are multiple contradicts and conflicts. While creative solution grows out of the interaction among various factors such as uncertainty, diversification and instability. The process of complicated educational reform does not present linear model with inflection. The development of school reform is intricate and complicated due to the relationship with each unique school. Reform is not only an urgent task for schools, but also schools' long-term social and historical responsibility. II. THE COMPLEXITY OF MORAL OBJECTIVE SELECTION FOR SCHOOL EDUCATIONAL REFORM School educational reform in any countries need to face an issue of moral objective selection, which means the reasons to reform school education. The complexity of moral objective lies in that some kind of power structure will be change: improving students' scholastic attainment as well as narrowing the gap between good students and bad students. American scholar Tyler maintains that educational philosophy is based on the following questions: "whether school should cultivate younger people to adapt to social status quo or have the revolutionary sense of mission to change the society? " [2] Brazilian educator Freire also points out that" there doesn't exit neutral educational process. Education is considered as a means to play a role in promoting younger generation to integrate to existing systematical logic or a means to practice freedom in which men and women treat the reality in a critical and creative manner and give full play to change their own world. "[3] School educational reform must undertake a moral responsibility to pursue democracy and social justice, cultivate students to be cultural adapters with critical awareness and educated, highly self-transcendent and creative problemsolvers. Such people obtain correct knowledge on the true, the good and the beautiful on basis of which they judge their own and social virtue and shortcomings. They are unstoppable in learning and keenly aware of their own ignorance, insufficient strength and growth limitation but are adamant in their confidence. "There were three important thoughts of view on moral objective of school educational reform in history-improving democracy and equality, promoting social Fund project: Theoretical and Pract ical Research on the Transformat ion and Development of Local Institutions of Higher Learn ing--A Case Study of Xiangnan University--established project of research on educational reform of Hunan institutions of higher learn ing in 2015 (Xiang Jiao Tong[2015] No. 291; Strategic Research on Applied Technology in Undergraduate Development--special project of Hunan provincial research institute of education (XJK015BJD011). 663 2018 2nd International Conference on Education, Economics and Management Research (ICEEMR 2018) Copyright © 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research (ASSEHR), volume 182