The Characteristics Of American Service Learning And Its Enlightenment For Ideological And Political Education In Chinese Middle Schools

With gradual enhancement of the trend of economy globalization, China is facing new opportunities and challenges during the period of social transformation since the beginning of 21st century. Hundred years' policy based on education, it is imperative to reform our school education in order to keep the pace of times. As a new learning theory and model, service learning comes from America and spreads widely, it combines curriculum learning with social services,and plays an important role in optimizing the effectiveness of education and cultivating the responsible citizens. It is not only good for overall development of young students but also can provide a good way for the development of school education in China macroscopically. Therefor, it is very significant to study and implement this new theory. Based on the rough study of service learning, in this paper, the author hopes to seek the best model of ideological politics education, with which moral and intellectual education can work properly in our middle school. We also want to find a good way in reforming of teaching and learning methods of ideological and political education in middle school.This paper is divided into three parts.In the first part of the thesis, the theoretical origin and development process of service learning have been reviewed respectively. Service learning was born from there theory sources: philosophy, psychology and education basis. And as time moves on,this type of theory has come through germination stage, developing stage and gradually ripe stage.The characteristics of service learning in America have been analyzed in the second part. American service learning has main features of normalization, mutual aid,comprehensive, reflective and educational. All of which reflective is the core of service learning.In the last section, by combining Chinese national conditions with the reality of ideological and political education in middle school of China, and basing on the advantages from the characteristics of American service learning, the advice was proposed for ideological and political education in middle school of China by this paper.At last, we hope the middle school political education of our country would carry on its due informative and educational, and continue to develop and self-improvement under the exam-oriented education tide.