On Good Life And Schooling

The human being is the aim and the beginning of education. The value of educational practice lies in that it leads the human being to self reflecting and pursuing the good life. Education begins with the understanding and grasping the nature of human being, therefore, it is also the key point of correctly understanding the aim and the value of education. The exploration of the nature of human being can be the common point before all the contemporary educational problems go into further discussion. It is the nature of the human being that the dissertation starts with and goes further into examining the educational impact on the human being, demonstrating the original status of the human being, reclaiming that education should concern on the good life of the human being. The dissertation provides a deep insight into the status of students'terrible school lives and the deep reasons causing it, and reconstructs schooling concerning for good life from three aspects of society, education and the human being.The dissertation consists of five chapters,Chapter 1 based on tracing back to historical debates on the nature of the human being, focuses on contemporary human being.By examining the negative effects from the modern schooling such as the fragmentization, abstraction, faultagization, empowering of the human being, it criticizes that the modern education is distorting the human nature and keeping the human being away from the good life they are longing for.Chapter 2 beginning with the ideal relationship between the human being, education and life, mainly addresses that education should concern on the good life. In this part it demonstrates the nature of the human being should be natural integrity, real verity, developing continuity and existing harmony. With the perspective of human nature, it goes further into the notion of good life, the mirror image and value of the education concerning on the good life.Chapter 3 examines and describes the painful school life they have to confront , which is as follows: the students'school life is trapped by the aim outside of education, which leads to the intervening and designing right absent from themselves; the students are imposed in the over-competitive position experiencing the negative moods such as being given up, being neglected and being harshly requested, which leads them to both self-empowering way of thinking and bad relationship with others; the adult's will intervenes into children's lives without any hesitation, which makes the schooling life, the most important phrase for the individual, loose its unique value and independent position; In morality, value, communication and culture etc. aspects, the institutionalized schooling life forgets the life wisdom which exists in and dominates our real life. The analysis highlights the fact that the schooling life is controlled, fragmented, colonized, sacrificed, which is on the contrary of the human nature and the aim of education.Chapter 4 sees an exploration of the schooling and students'lives in the broad social background, and provides with the deep reasons for the failure of education leading the students to good life. It is the lost education ideal in modernism and post-modernism that makes the definite schooling thought and the steady education ideal absent from education. Education concerning on both rationality(the symbol of modernism) and irrationality(the symbol of postmodernism) cannot be totally carried out in modern China. The double absence of rationality and irrationality in education contributes to the lost of autonomy of life dominated by instrumental rationality, the lost of the integrity of life since it is divided into daily life and non-daily life. That means a man becomes the victim of his own life.Chapter 5 tries to reconstruct the education theory concerning on good life in the aspects of society, education, subject. It calls on that educational inner logic should be followed and the reasonable professional autonomy of education should be returned so that the aim of education can be based on the nature of human being, that the thought preparation for the realization of good life can be ready; that the administration of education should be reformed so that the space and time environment for the good life can be designed; that the subject of the schooling life should be concerned---it is teachers and students who will finally practice schooling for good life. The last but not the least point is that schooling concerning for good life focuses not only on the good life in students'real life, but also on their possible good life in the future, which extends the guidance of schooling to the whole life of one person.