Rational And Restlessness

Although it appears usual in public daily education activities, "training" has long been marginalized in educational researches. From the perspective of cultural sociology, the present dissertation chooses the "training crazy", a cultural phenomenon, which has penetrated into the ordinary daily life of almost everybody, as a perspective window for contemporary cultural ethos and social character. In this research, the meditation upon the prevalent "training crazy" is brought into the sociological core subject and hidden topic: "modernity and anxiety". This research analyzes various anxious attitudes derived from the "training crazy": individual (including parents') "career anxiety", "success anxiety", "identity (self-identity) anxiety", even "body anxiety" and "trust anxiety" between enterprises and employees. It is these stealthily formed anxieties that make training activities prosperous and chaotic. The coexistence of boom and chaos, reason and restlessness is the true reflection of this "training crazy" in current China. On the basis of phenomenon description, this research emphatically analyzes how social anxiety contained in "training crazy" is constructed by society itself and how the "anonymous authorities" such as "globalization trap", "expert worship" and "mass-media power" add fuel to the fire of the social construction of public anxiety.This research tries to persist on the phenomenon-oriented research as a conscious pursuit of methodology, with reference to certain perspectives and methods from Culture Studies, social psychology, consuming sociology and semeiology, etc. As a multi-dimensional social research, the present dissertation adopts methods such as interview, on-the-site observation, text analysis comprehensively, and then penetrates into these "training crazy" from different aspects and finds out the social source of feeling dilemma of the mass. This research is not the kind of prescriptive study on how to conduct or choose training but tries to describe the attitudes of ordinary people and social characters behind this window of "training crazy". With rethinking and unthinking the "training crazy" from the view of social critical theory and by virtue of cultural reflexive over the basic questions of educational theories such as training (education) justice, marketing training, etc., this research aims at inspiring the humanitarian thought on "training crazy".By unveiling the complexity of "training crazy", this research demonstrates that the superficial boom is just the reflection of interior anxieties of common people while meeting with the conflict between the tradition and the modernity. What exists behind it are no help, no capability and no alternatives. Through this window of "training crazy", it is suggested that the anxiety and discomposure, a kind of mass restlessness without sense, exist in common people especially during the violent social changes. Social anxious atmosphere and individual anxious mind interact with each other. "Training crazy" never means that we are being in a triumphant "life-long learning" era which benefits everyone, also never means that a truly "learning society" will be constructed so rapidly and so easily. We call on the coming back of belief and reason, and call on the reconstruction of new belief and rationality.