On The Learning Labor

As the changes of educational idea, people's focus on education is turning from"instruct"to"learn". The research on learning has become the focal point of multi-subjects."Learning is a labor", this idea is a necessary conclusion by analyzing learning and labor from the Educational Economics perspective. Learning is a kind of labors and also a basic labor form in human society. Learning-labor has the characteristics of both physical labor and mental labor, which obviously reflects the features of mental labor, complex labor and spirit-production labor.Learning-labor is a kind of labor which the learners consciously put into in order to cultivate their labor abilities. It aims at human's varieties of knowledge and skills and will ultimately improve the labors abilities. This is the Learning-labor's intrinsic feature distinguishing other kinds of labor forms. So the nature of learning-labor shows as formation of labor force value and realization of human capital accumulation and value increment. Compared with material production labor, learning-labor shows its obvious features as follows: particular and diverse elements; bidirectional and complex process; collective and individual collaboration approach; accumulative fruit and its non-expendable and increment of use value; potential value. From the perspective of typology, learning labor has three types: learning-labor in school; learning-labor in work practice; learning-labor in leisure time. Since learning-labor is one type of social labor, it will be rewarded with different contents and in different form which is related to learning character. The reward of Learning-Labor is some repayments that people can achieve by Learning-Labor, which includes two aspects: extrinsic and intrinsic. The extrinsic rewards embody obviousness and directness. We should pay attention to a basic posture that if you learning more you will get more, but which is not the only manifestation. And the intrinsic repayments have recessiveness and spirit.The Learning-Labor theory should work as an important component of educational economics, therefore this can be called a well educational economics with a integral system. The establishment of Learning-Labor theory is benefit to enrich the category in educational economics, and provide some new ideas to support the theory. In a word, it is advantageous to explain some economic phenomena of the labor market that is difficulty to explain, promote the rational development of the employment market, and offer a theoretical basis for the rationalization of the educational cost and expense.