Redefining the Purpose of Education: A Policy Analysis of China's 1985 Decision on the Reform of the Education System

Abstract

This policy-analysis essay examines how the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee's 1985 Decision on the Reform of the Education System redefined the purposes of education in post-Mao China. It interprets the policy through three related perspectives: curriculum as a social construction, education within a developmental state, and schooling as a mechanism of social selection. The essay argues that the reform marked a significant movement from Mao-era ideological subject formation toward modernization, human-capital development, scientific and technical knowledge, and economic competitiveness. This reorientation supported educational expansion, vocational diversification, and China's wider socioeconomic transformation, while also reorganizing which forms of knowledge and credentials received institutional value. The analysis identifies an enduring tension: education can enable mobility and national development while simultaneously reproducing urban-rural and socioeconomic inequalities through unequal access to resources and examination-based selection. The Chinese case consequently illustrates both the possibilities and limits of development-oriented curriculum policy. The essay concludes that economic purposes need not exclude humanistic aims, but an excessive dominance of economic rationality may marginalize critical, ethical, civic, and cultural dimensions of education.