Philosophical Thinking On Open Education

It is a predeterminate duty for education to detect and foster individual's comprehensive development. However, currently China's education still focuses on the development of children's intelligence and competence of examination. The "products" of modern education are somehow high scores but low ability and students are reluctant to go to school. What is worse, students even consider school a terrible place as a prison, in which teachers as well as examinations are evils. What is the problem of education that causes the criticism of the whole society? Beyond the prosperity of modern education lie masses of problems and crises, mainly of weak students, ill-mannered behavior, poor morality, the materialism, and teachers and schools ill behavior. It is true that the phenomenon has something to do with the social environment, but can education play a role in solving the problems? And how can education become attractive? Open education originated in the early 20th century with the arising of the informal education in Britain and the new education in the European continent. It was well-developed after the Second World War and in 1970s, it became popular. Now open education has developed well in Britain, the US, Japan, Israel and Taiwan. Open education is constructed on the basis of the critical consideration about modern education and of the situation of different countries and regions. In fact, what education is the best education is an eternal question in education. Although the view point of open education is very different from that of modern education, its aim is to foster "man". And "man" is the object of education, and the basic problem of educational sciences is to solve the fostering of "man". Therefore, this thesis, through cleaning up open education, tries to answer the validity and limitation and the reference drawn for modern education. Adopting methodologies like literature, comparison, history, experience summing-up, the thesis does research on open education in the following five parts: Part One, the crisis of modern education and its criticism, mainly analyzes the criticism on modernism from philosophers, educators, and educational practice. Part Two, the history and actuality of open education, mainly introduces the origin, connotation and characteristics of open education. Part Three, philosophical perspective of open education, studies the origin of thoughts so as to analyze the values of open education. Part Four, the rationality and limitation of open education, firstly analyzes the feature of open education, then the rationality and limitation. Part Five, the value of open education, analyzes the inspiration of open education for the educational theories and practice in Mainland China.