A Study On The Theory And Practice Of Global Education

We are facing a brand-new global era, which brings forward great challenges for education. In such an era, we need to cultivate citizens who can adapt to and reconstruct a world characterized by unified economic, multi-polarized politics, multi-cultures and interconnected ecosystem. Global education is such a new type of educational theory and practice responding to the challenges of global era.Presently, in the educational research area, there has been much probe into global education. However, previous studies either settled for introducing theory and practice in foreign countries or lacked penetrating studies, as well as was short of analysis and research of its meaning, content, goal, etc.This dissertation adopted methods of documentary analysis, comparison analysis and text content analysis. The author started from analyzing the characteristics of the global era and its challenges to education, discussed the traces of global education in the USA, UK and Japan and their characteristics. Based on this, through a discussion on the contradiction between nationalism and cosmopolitism, as well as contradiction between national citizenship and world citizenship, carried on a theoretic discussion on global education. Then analyzed global education in China, followed by a reconstruction of goal, content and methods of global education.The results of this research are as follow:Firstly, as a kind of educational idea and practice, global education has been embedded in the USA,UK and Japan for more than thirty years. There are three orientations in curriculum idea and goal:global, nation and individual, which embody contradictions among theorists, the government and teachers. Global education in the USA reflects the Americans'identification with the leading status in the world. The goal of global education in UK underwent a trace from national citizen to world citizen or from UK citizen to Europe citizen to global citizen. Global education in Japan is nation-orientated and stress on patriotism and international understanding. It's contents varied with epoch.Secondly, global education surpassed the traditional educational ideas of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Through the lens of nationalism, the main task of education is to socialize individuals, cultivate citizens with patriotism and national perspectives, perspectives of rights and duties, democracy and legality idea,and morality qualities as well. Through the lens of cosmopolitanism, ideal goal of education is to cultivate world citizens, who surpass the identity of member of community, homeland and country, and identify themselves as global citizens or world citizens. Global education should surpasses these two concepts and advocate the idea of cultivating national citizens with global consciousness.Thirdly, since the practice of curriculum reform in the pre-college education early 21st century, citizenship education in our country has extended its vision to cultivate citizens'global consciousness. Global education has been preferably carried out in the standards in pre-college curriculum, while there are still pretty many problems in ideology and political theory curriculum in colleges, such as overwhelmingly political, theory indoctrination as the only method, vision limited in national scope, etc.Thirdly, as for the goal of global education, we need to cultivate corresponding cognition, skill and value to act successfully as multi-identity citizens. As for the implement of global education, there are three main domains:in the domain of the relationship between human and nature, we get population education, environment education and sustainable development education; of the relationship between human and the society, we get global system, trans-cultures and peace education; of the relationship between human and itself, we get health education, custom education, life education and belief education. Besides moral subjects, other subjects, trans-subject or multi-subject topic learning and practice are important channel to put global education in practice. Campus culture supply the cultural basis for global education. As far as methods are concerned, dialogue, communication and collaboration are vital methods of global education.