The form and content of textbooks reflect the social context, educational thought, and the perspective of knowledge, and also pertains to the views of curriculum, teaching, and learning at different times. The research on textbooks is gradually stressed over the past years, but the historical documents are not so enough for the related research. To promote the systematical research on textbooks, it is essential work to build the vivid oral historical data to make up the lack of existing documents. Based on the intention, the three-year project aims to build the oral historical documents about compulsory education textbooks development during 1952 to 2001, including Chinese language, mathematics, society, nature, life and ethics in primary school , and Chinese language, civil, history and geography in junior high school.
From the results of the study, the textbooks appear diversified, but the mission and spirit of the textbook editors have gradually disappeared. Therefore, the future education administration should consider how to retrieve the textbook editors' sense of mission and innovation to improve the quality of textbooks. At the same time, it is suggested that the future education policy should provide ample time for the implementing unit to develop textbook mechanism with research, experiment and trial.
