Values And Education

Some educational issues deserve exploring while Chinese education is approaching the modernization. They are reflecting the modernity of Chinese education and the relationship between values and education, reconstructing the educational idea starting from the existence of human beings and values educational theory. The gist of this dissertation is to construct the basic theory of values education considering the educational practice in China. With the thought to the modernity of Chinese education, the dissertation focuses the themes on the existence prefabrication of human beings, mainly expounds the value-loaded education based on the reality in China while taking the contemporary values education in West as reference.The dissertation is composed of four parts or chapters.The first chapter reviews the values crisis of modernity from the viewpoint of philosophy to prepare for exploring the relationship between education and values as well as values education. The concept of values is also reinterpreted in this part. The evolution of values setting is outlined from Plato who set the base of metaphysics for values and created the metaphysical tradition of western philosophy to the middle ages the base of values was resigned to the God, and from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the rationality, human right and freedom of human being became the basic values setting. However, the enlightening rationality that germinated the modernity varied while approaching the modernization of the world. The tendency of instrumentally understanding rationality resulted in the gradual decrease or disappearance of substantive rationality. Nihilism, materialism, utilitarianism and scientism became popular and the society of human beings fell into the values crisis of modernity. The cause of the values crisis of modernity includes two aspects: one is the arrogance of rationality and the expansion of instrument reason; the other is the subjectivity of metaphysics and metaphysicization of subjects. The essential of the value crisis of modernity is the crisis of the legitimacy of the narrative to human being. Philosophers and thinkers made some efforts to rescue the value crisis of modernity in history. This dissertation reviewed the relative theories in order to offer a new horizon and model in exploring the value issue. Since 1980s, values issue has been studied in philosophical field in China. But the researching approach limits within the viewpoint of subjective epistemology to conceptualize the value. This dissertation prefers to the researching approach of Existential-Ontology that holds the view to combine the value with the existence of human beings internally, display the connotations of value from the whole existing of human being. That is, the living world is the origin of value, but the value of human being aims at surpassing. Human being base himself on the living world and leading to "a possible life".