On The Teaching Returning To The Life-world

The issues of education are among the fundamental issues of our society, which are closely related to the prosperity and the national rejuvenation of the country. In China, teachers and students bear high expectations of the society, but the response of the reality is negative. The debates on "quality education and examination-oriented education" are protracted, education always succumbs to money and power, and students who are the final products of education lack social flexibility and innovation ability to reform the society. It seems that education has lost the function to transform human mind.But to Habermas, this is just one of the numerous social problems of modern society. Habermas developed a model of system/life-world to understand, analyze and criticize modern society. He thought a basic characteristic of modern society was the colonization of life-world due to the infringement of system. The way to extricate from colonization is to rationalize the life-world, which means the rationalization of communicative action. Communicative rationalization requires that all participants of communicative action communicate freely and equally without any pressure, and then reach a non-compulsory understanding and consensus. This is a process of returning to life-world.The dissertation is an application of Habermas' system/life-world theory to analyze teaching. In today's China, the life-worlds of teachers and students are facing colonization or they may have been colonized. Teachers and students cannot communicate in an honest and equal way because they are both under unreasonable restrictions. The solution is to let them communicate and dialogue in the atmosphere of liberty, democracy, equality and respect without any irrational constraints, reach understanding and coordination on the base of mutual recognition, and in the end achieves the teaching and learning process successfully. The rationalization of teaching is to let the life-worlds of teachers and students extricate from colonization, and it is to let teaching return to life-world.This dissertation is divided into five chapters. The introduction clarifies the methodology and the status quo of the related research. Chapter 2 elaborates the life-world theory of Habermas. Chapter 3 analyzes why and how teaching should return to life-world. Chapter 4 discusses whether the philosophy of teaching returning to life-world is reflected in the curriculum of science. The last chapter is the summary of the full dissertation.