Education Equity And Socail Fairness

In the process of human society's development, social equity has always been an ideal and pursuit of the people who advocate democracy. As an important part of social equity, education equity is not only the embodiment and extension of social equity in the area of education; it is also the foundation of social equity, the most fundamental means of and approach to its realization. In view of the economic, social and political foundations of education, western socialists have carried out substantial research around the topic of education equity after the World War II, especially from the sixties and the seventies. European countries have also made some practice and exploration concerning this issue, which has proved to be very fruitful. Taking mainly Britain, France, Germany and the four countries of Northern Europe as samples, this thesis analyzes the evolvement of these countries' educational policies and their influence on social equity.From the view of historical development, with the rise of the views of "educational democratization", "lifelong education" and "human capital", the educational development of the European developed countries can be divided to three stages, i.e., the educational development from postwar age to the seventies, the adjustment of educational policies from the seventies to the nineties, and the view of social equity and education since the New Labor was empowered. The development of education has also presented different characteristics at different stages. From the early postwar period to the seventies, European countries were devoted to the advancement of the compulsory education and education equity in the area of fundamental education underwent a great progress. Margaret Thatcher introduced market principles into the area of education after she was in power, which improved the educational quality, but at the same time, the inequality of educational opportunity of all sectors of society deteriorated. After the New labor came into power, they presented the idea of "a third way" and "a social investment society", which promoted education equity in depth.Nowadays, in European developed countries, free compulsory education has been established in the area of elementary and secondary education, and the equity of opportunity has been greatly progressed in the area of higher and vocational education. In Northern European countries like Finland, free education has been established even in the area of higher education. The deep advancement of education equity in Europe has brought enormous economic and social benefits and achieved the double purposes of exalting the state's competitive capacity and accelerating social harmony.Indeed, we can not transplant the European countries' experience into the construction of our socialist modernization for the reason that there are lots of differences between our country and the western countries in politics, economics, culture and history. However, the European countries, following the history trend of socialization in this knowledge economy era, put the education development and education equity in the first place. They change the "social welfare spending" into "human capital investment" and transform "the welfare states" into "the social investment states". During this process, they balanced the economic efficiency and social equity which made their countries highly economic developed, stable and harmonious "utopias" area. In this sense, the experience of the European countries should be commonly referred to.