Themes of Education Philosophy in Modern Society

Guiling Han

Faculty of Education Science, Shangqiu Normal University, Shangqiu, Henan, 476000, China

Keywords: Modern education philosophy, humanization, expansibility, practicability.

Abstract: For education in modern society, corresponding ideology is needed to guide proper and efficient educational

work. It is positive for educational work to enhance study of education philosophy in modern society. In

terms of current state of domestic education development, problems emerge mainly from objective reality

and psychology of teachers and students. Education philosophies and thoughts tend to have several

similarities, where humanization, expansibility and practicability of education are the most representative.

1 INTRODUCTION

Education philosophy is a field where philosophy is

used to interpret and influence human educational

activities. Dating back to ancient times, some

philosophies gave significant enlightenment to

educational thoughts and ideas, such as Confucian

thought of equal education for various students, and

early thought system of materialism advocated by

legalists. In modern times, people with lofty ideals

paid more attention to education, with emancipation

of minds and eastward spread of western culture

(Wen Hengfu, Yang Li, 2012). This contributed to

the formation of advanced and enlightened

education mode which laid a necessary foundation

for today’s education prosperity. Due to inseparable

relationship between education philosophy and

educational activities, coordination of them helps

achieve the goals — to impart knowledge and

educate people and to rejuvenate China. On the

contrary, without appropriate philosophy, teaching

performance is likely to walk on a wrong path,

ultimately trapped in the vicious circle of talent

training and giving adverse guide and negative

impact to students. Therefore, schools and teachers

need some ideas of philosophies as guidelines to

ensure their work in a right direction. Guided by

education philosophies, teachers are able to grasp

main contradictions in educational work, consider

and balance all factors and prolong vitality of

teaching practice.

2 CURRENT STATE OF

EDUCATION IN MODERN

SOCIETY

As a Chinese saying goes, strong youths lead to

strong country. Education is the hope of a country

and a nation, with next generation education

regarded as a main approach to change future social

life. Throughout history, education forms developed

from old-style private school and imperial

examination in ancient times to modern popular

prenatal education, preschool education, compulsory

education and higher education (Pan Xiwu, 2011).

Whatever their purposes are, people commonly hope

children to be well-educated for a better future.

Before studying in school, people, in most cases,

are innocent, ignorant and pure. Enjoying those

characters, they may fail to cope with kinds of

challenges from cultures, interpersonal

communication and complex society when they

grow up. Education in fact is a process for a person

to be physically and mentally matured, and form and

perfect outlook on life and values. Both educational

activities and philosophies displaying in activities

will profoundly and significantly influence the

innocent children.

Covering a long history of education, Chinese

extracted precious experience and lessons from

teaching practices in a long time, such as equal

education without classification of students and

striving with one’s own efforts under teachers'

Han G.

Themes of Education Philosophy in Modern Society.

DOI: 10.5220/0006444200830086

In ISME 2016 - Information Science and Management Engineering IV (ISME 2016), pages 83-86

ISBN: 978-989-758-208-0

guidance. Chinese education now faces a huge

amount of educated people, various types of

education and spotty education levels, showing great

differences in terms of time and space (He Junhua,

2008). It is easy to find schools enjoying good

equipment, kinds of curriculums and strong teaching

staff, while there are schools with few students,

blocked traffic, one or two rural teachers, no fine

blackboard and desks and chairs. Due to the huge

objective differences, educational activities and

qualities also diverge greatly from other schools.

In addition, students are forced into fierce

competition by gradual saturation of education

capacity. Students are compelled to study

excessively due to issues of difficulties of going to

school or entering higher schools; besides, heavy

school work always squeezes out-of-class time. Such

cruel learning mode will accompany students from

kindergarten to senior high school and university for

over ten years. For domestic students, grueling study

has turned into a nightmare. In foreigners’ eyes,

Chinese students always study hard, though they are

not born like this. Compared with American children

aged around ten who receive liberal education and

light homework within one hour, Chinese students

have already been imbued concepts about score, test

and enrollment rate by schools and parents. As

results, student’s nature and creative thinking are

constricted, contributing to failure to dominate their

growth and study even with strong learning inertia.

This kind of education will expose its defects rather

than improvement in the long run, leading to

retrogression of scholastic ability and other students’

abilities without promoting domestic education.

Advanced educational concepts handed down for

years are still significant models for modern

education to learn from, such as incorporating things

of different diverse nature proposed by Cai Yuanpei

and emancipation of minds. However, facing

improper distribution of educational resources and

partial and rational educational concepts, school,

together with teachers and parents loses composure.

Proper and effective modern education cannot be

achieved without recognition of social reality and

stable promotion of education forwardly.

3 THEMES OF EDUCATION

PHILOSOPHY IN MODERN

SOCIETY

3.1 Humanization of Modern

Education

Humanization practically represents an enlightened

attitude and inclination, upholding that respecting

every single person is essential prerequisite for

certain social change. The renaissance in early

Europe showed that recognition of people’s views or

thoughts and liberation of human nature can not only

ensure correct and scientific guiding thoughts for

activities but also accumulate strong spiritual

strength for a team or group to promote people’s

behavior.

Education is a bright field where creative

teaching and guiding work are engaged. Long-term

psychological construct is required in teachers’

imparting knowledge and training students. As with

the concept of human innate goodness proposed by

Mencius in The Doctrine of the Mean, everyone has

a sense of sympathy, sense of shame and sense of

right and wrong, which are indicated in modern

education. Teachers are required to replace

reprimand and punishment in class with proper and

timely communication and psychological instruction

in line with the efforts of function transformation of

teachers and schools. For example, teachers are

supposed to walk down rostrum into students, make

friends with them for psychological intimacy,

communicate with them and educate them. The

change of attitude and identity not only helps with

teachers’ and schools’ smooth transformation, but

also psychologically relax students to carry out

learning plan freely. Meanwhile, a bilateral

communication mode between teachers and students

is formed to gain knowledge and abilities.

In addition, humanization of modern education is

also shown in specific teaching activities. Single and

old teaching concepts cannot cope with a large

number of students with various characters, and

students aged around ten or twenty who think even

more actively and boldly. Therefore, previous

thoughts need transforming to improve education

activities spirally and dynamically as soon as

possible. At present, firm adherence to familiar

pipelining teaching and duck-stuffing teaching

hardly stops the teaching dilemma but escalate

contradictions between students, teachers and

teaching, ultimately destroying teacher-student

cooperation. It is more significant to classify

students’ learning needs and treat students

differently. With foci both on group and individual

students, teachers are able to get a whole picture of

students’ learning to make use of scale advantages,

and instruct individual student with best efforts for

comprehensive development. Though this approach

is bound to demand more manpower, and material

and financial resources, it complies with its purpose

— all for children. With different characters,

students who have huge potential will infinitely

enlarge positive effect of the investment. Therefore,

talents in various fields will be discovered through

education, making educational activities charming.

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3.2 Expansibility of Modern Education

Facing chances and challenges brought by new

social elements, domestic educational work now still

needs refinement and improvement. Deng Xiaoping

has ever pointed out that education shall be oriented

to the needs of future, of the world, of the

modernization, which now are keys to keep constant

development of education.

Current educational work is different from that

of two or three decades ago, mainly attributing to

development of hardware devices. Teachers now

take advantages of multimedia and remote resources

in class while students replace their handwritten

notes with multimedia courseware and electronic

devices. In addition, Internet revolution provides

both convenience and temptation for teachers and

students through changing traditional class mode

with textbook and notes in educational field — the

peak of knowledge activities. Despite the easy

access to knowledge brought by internet, educators

are reminded to think about preservation of

education value. Meanwhile, educators are supposed

to turn students’ volatility in information era into

learning desire. Educational expansibility will be

retained, with the dynamic tracking of education

tendency and social talent demands and the timely

understanding of current affairs’ influence on talent

training. Therefore, demands adjustment is likely to

be conducted by catering to the policies.

Khan Academy mentioned in Salman Khan’s

book persistently carries out free online education

which relies on strong internet function of resource

transport and broad display platform. It wins good

comments and reputation from the world mainly by

its use of internet resources along with internet

revolution and realization of its value proceeding

from public benefit. Besides the development space

brought by internet, educators are supposed to pay

attention to hot issues, international interactions and

educational innovations, which are fresh to people

and have strong vitality from birth to death with

possible changes. Therefore, people need to dig

them up in depth within a very limited time to help

with teaching activities, for example, topics may be

about air accident of missing Malaysia Airlines

flight 370, food safety issues about KFC and

McDonald’s, FIFA World Cup in Brazil. With

topic’s involvement in teaching activities, teachers

are enabled to guide students to think about reasons

of the accidents and instruct their seeing and

hearing. Education constant development and

innovation need endless materials to provide new

ways and references, and various lessons from other

parts of society to succeed.

3.3 Practicability of Modern Education

Different from the fixed pattern formed by imperial

examination for selection of governors in ancient

times, modern education particularly has practical

significance. Specialized operation with high

standards demands of people sufficient basic

education and professional education. With the

concept of education serving economy and society

which is not customized for vocational education,

kinds of education are supposed to combine

purposes and aims with the demands of talent

training. By the combination, education emphasizes

more on some particular aspects according to social

needs of talent for social and economic construction,

in order to overthrow the “useless” bias of education

and create fortune for humankind. As domestic

education benefited from society should in turn

benefit the society, modern education philosophy

seems to follow this trend to bring powerful impetus

for domestic education which stepped into a plateau.

As teaching plan of practical education is based

on adequate practical surveys, teachers are

guaranteed to change teaching focus by reliable data

and practical experience. For example, in Chinese

teaching, students’ practical states may drive

enhancement of practical writing, reading

comprehension and proper curriculum adjustment.

In terms of examination, corresponding adjustment

may be conducted according to different practical

value of different chapters, in order to examine and

train students’ strain capacity. All these adjustments

require schools and teachers to break through the

traditional exam-oriented education to optimize

structure of teaching contents and ensure maximum

benefits for students. Additionally, to discriminate

and select good teaching plans also indicates

practicability of education, with some impractical

and idealistic innovations excluded from educational

practice due to grandstanding and flashy contents.

Though education is encouraged to stretch thinking

and apply innovative concepts, the essences of

education cannot be neglected. Education may

achieve false prosperity by some strange titles and

teaching performance as well as impractical methods

which hardly represent the direction of education

development, scarcely improve teaching quality but

puzzle and disgust students. In measurement and

evaluation of teaching innovation, people ought to

be cautious to strictly balance practicability and

feasibility. Teaching practice is essential to evaluate

even fantastic teaching concepts, contributing to the

prevention of distortions and the deterioration of

education and the formation of precise

understanding of education philosophy.

Themes of Education Philosophy in Modern Society

4 CONCLUSIONS

Under the background of a complex and volatile

society, constant development of domestic education

essentially requires precise understanding of

education philosophy. Studies and discussions

conducted by specialists and scholars, along with

educators’ practices concluded the more clear

themes of education: human concern for students,

dynamic understanding based on internet and social

affairs and continuous enhancement of

practicability, all of which provide right direction for

education development and space for educators’

self-improvement. Meanwhile, other advanced

education philosophies and corresponding ideologies

will be examined and improved in teaching

practices.

REFERENCES

He Junhua, Construction of Modernized Educational

Philosophy with Axiology: Comments on Wang

Qingkun’s Book of Educational Philosophy – A Study

of Philosophy with Axiology, Jounal of Higher

Correspondence Education (Philosophy and Social

Science), 2008 (6): 79-80.

Pan Xiwu, The Fall of Modern Educational Philosophy

and its Consequences, Journal of Schooling Studies,

2011 (4): 5-10.

Wen Hengfu, Yang Li, Significance of Constructive

Postmodern Educational Philosophy on Education

Reform: Summary of International Academic

Symposium on Constructive Postmodernism and China,

Philosophical Trends, 2012 (11): 111-112.

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