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Holistic Education Ideas, Research And Higher Education Practice

Posted on:2008-03-29Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:D H ZhangFull Text:PDF
GTID:1117360245973416Subject:Education
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Emerging in the 1960s and 1970s in America, Holistic education thoughts, which was influenced by counterculture movement and humanistic thoughts, also reflected the trend of cultural root-seeking at that time in Europe. Based on ecological worldview, holistic education seriously criticizes the industrial worldview which has emerged since Industrial Revolution. It attempts to re-examine the influence exerted by science and technology, reflecting the impacts and presses on human spiritual life brought by science and technology, the worship of standardization and quantization, as well as a thorough supervision of bureaucracy system exerted by extremely reasonable display in the ecological, global and life consciousness vision.As one of the educational trends, holistic education is a new paradigm which based on a new worldview and different from the traditional industrial education. It redefines the meaning of human nature as well as the nature of education, learning and intelligence. Holistic education which emphasizes on the concepts of "wholeness" and "relationship", aims to redesign curriculum with an integrated view on knowledge. Education with a holistic perspective is concerned with the harmonious development of "whole person" in an all-round way, an open and honest communication between students and teachers, and the construction of learning communities, thus helping to realize the prospect of social reform through education.Holistic education not only continues the harmonious educational thoughts in Greek, embodies the esteem for natural educational thoughts since Rousseau, but also echoes humanistic educational thoughts. It criticizes education in industrial age which over-emphasis the importance of cognition and rational. However, it focuses on irrational factors such as intuition, emotion and imagination in education. Holistic education shows obvious distrust on technological worldview which is the cornerstone of industrialized society. It tries to maintain a holistic and ecological worldview and system thinking, and insists on advocating post-modern perspectives on education. However, the concepts of unbounded potentiality and Spirituality are somewhat mysticism.This paper aims to explore the thoughts, processes and basic principles of holistic education systematically through an overview of its background, ideology and theoretical origin. Because its concepts of "wholeness" and "relationship" coincide with some views on Chinese traditional thoughts, holistic education has echoed by several universities in Taiwan and HongKong regions. This paper studies Chung Yuan Christian University and HongKong Baptist University as cases to demonstrate the practice of holistic education in higher education. It also discusses the possibilities of absorbing holistic education idea into higher education in our country by exerting general education and environmental education as the breakthrough point.
Keywords/Search Tags:Holistic education, general education, environmental education, holism
PDF Full Text Request
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