Dewey's Thoughts On Moral Education And The Transformation Of Moral Education In China

Focused on the problem of moral education transformation, the thesis tries to find some clues in John Dewey's masterpieces and practices. Based on Dewey's works on education, the thesis is a thorough analysis of Dewey's thoughts on moral education. Dewey understood morality and moral education in an absolutely new way, in accordance with his democratic society ideal and pragmatism experience thought. The pragmatism ethics viewed morality as the process of problem solving in specific experience situations, and viewed knowledge, skills, characteristics as the elements of one's morality, which in fact equated the moral process to the improvement of experience, and equated moral education process to the improvement of experience ( It is just the education process itself in Dewey's educational theory). The essence of Dewey's thoughts on moral education is the thoughts of a morally-conducted education, which means Dewey's thoughts on moral education is equated with his thoughts on education. The core of Dewey's thoughts on moral education is to cultivate moral citizens by morally-conducted education. In detail, the moral citizen is not the man who strictly obeys the rules set by the traditional ethics, but the qualified member who can fulfill different requirements of the democratic society; the morally-conducted education is not the education which follows the traditional rules, but the education which meets the demands of the modern society on qualified citizens in terms of the motive and the effect, the education which cultivates qualified citizens. The boundaries between knowledge and morality, moral education and education, are dispelled in the thoughts of morally-conducted education.In his series of educational classics, Dewey thoroughly analyzed the role, aim, curriculum, instruction model, administration model and the instruction method of direct moral education of the school education in the democratic society, which was closely based on his moral education thoughts. Taking his thoughts as a whole, we can find clearly the dialectical characteristics: on the relationship between individual and society, he transcended the opinion of antagonism between individual and society and established the educational aim which combined the individual and the society; on the relationship between knowledge and morality, he transcended the tradition of divorcing knowledge from morality, regarded knowledge as part of morality instead, and hence equated moral education to education; on the relationship between education and growth, he broke through the limit of institutional education that paid no attention to children's growth, and called on the new form of school education that emphasized on promoting growth; on the relationship between experience and...