Scientific Development Concept and Chinese Educational Reform

Author: edited by Zhu Yongxin / associate edited by He Xiaozhong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: Education moves toward tomorrow through exploration, and the hopeful tomorrow relies on a worthy kind of education. If tomorrow's education can be called life-oriented education, then the new opportunities it gains must be entrusted to a generation that dedicates their entire lives to it. The topic of education is weighty yet full of hope, and from here we pray for tomorrow. After numerous external pursuits have faded, education returns to the warmth of life to seek its original purpose. Compared to fields like politics and economics, which depend on a sense of power, education has a non-utilitarian dimension. This dimension allows education to remain independent of worldly "power" or "gain," preserving the calmness of judgment and fulfillment of life, and thereby establishing its irreplaceable and non-delegable mission. Of course, education will not ignore the various demands from politics and economics, but its central focus remains education, which can never shrink its critical and transcendent nature. It responds to the ideas of politics and economics with its own ideas but does not serve as a servant to the current politics and economy. The multidimensionality of its mission is only because of the multidimensionality of life's values, and its essential content ultimately depends on the essential content of life. If we say that politics, by its nature, aims to establish a reasonable order for society to achieve the "justice" value that life expects, economics, by its nature, aims to provide a better living environment for the nation to achieve the "prosperity" value that life pursues, ethics, by its nature, aims at the "harmony" value, art, by its nature, aims to create another world through aesthetic forms to cultivate the "beauty" value that life yearns for, and the Dao, by its essence, aims to reflectively elevate the spiritual realm of people to cultivate the "goodness" value that life cannot afford to lack in its spiritual inwardness, then the mission of education lies in guiding people's value consciousness, grasping the tension between multidimensional values to cultivate people's life. Under the scrutiny of scientific worldview, our education still has many non-scientific development realities and tendencies, which are reflected both at the macro level of national education systems, scales, structures, types, and regional advancement, and at the micro level of curriculum and teaching reform, teaching models, methods, and educational concepts. Led by Professor Zhu Yongxin, a doctoral supervisor at Soochow University, a group of educational scholars, with a sense of urgency and responsibility, specifically discuss this topic and gave birth to this book. They hope to provide some ideas and inspiration for the reform and development of Chinese education, and to inspire more educational theorists and practitioners to reflect on the reality of education, explore educational perspectives, and plan for the future of education.