Integrating Ideological and Political Education into After-School Services in Chinese Primary Schools under the "Double Reduction" Policy: Value Logic, Practical Dilemmas, and Optimization Pathways
Under the "Double Reduction" policy, after-school services in Chinese primary schools have shifted from a supplementary care arrangement to an important component of the school education system. This transformation creates a new institutional space for implementing the fundamental task of moral cultivation and for integrating ideological and political education with students' everyday learning, social participation, labor experience, cultural identity, and behavioral development. Based on policy analysis and a synthesis of relevant research, this study examines the value logic, current practices, practical dilemmas, and optimization pathways of integrating ideological and political education into primary school after-school services. The analysis shows that after-school services possess distinctive advantages in experiential learning, flexible curriculum organization, cross-subject integration, and collaborative education. They can complement classroom-based moral education by converting abstract values into observable actions and lived experiences. However, current practice is constrained by conceptual separation between care and education, formalistic activity design, fragmented curricula, insufficient age differentiation, teacher workload and capability gaps, uneven regional resources, weak home-school-community coordination, and evaluation systems that emphasize participation rather than value formation. To address these problems, the paper proposes an integrated framework centered on moral cultivation, organized through four developmental dimensions and multiple thematic modules, supported by experiential and project-based pedagogy, professional teacher communities, multi-stakeholder governance, differentiated support for rural and border schools, and process-oriented evaluation. The study argues that ideological and political education should not be mechanically added to after-school services; rather, it should be embedded in curriculum objectives, activity processes, organizational culture, and reflective evaluation in an age-appropriate, life-oriented, and non-formalistic manner. This transformation can improve the educational quality of after-school services and contribute to a more equitable and coherent basic education ecosystem.