Human society is undergoing two fundamental changes, one is from an industrialized society to a knowledge-based economy society, and the other is from one-time academic education to lifelong learning. It is precisely because the development of social productive forces is closely related to the level of human resources development and national innovation ability that these two major changes are a whole, both institutional changes and cultural evolution. Therefore, lifelong and sustainable education is becoming the policy direction of many countries, and the new carrier and platform formed by information network technology have also injected unprecedented power and vitality into the change of learning methods. Related to the information transmitted by the perfect market mechanism, education is fully adapting to the diversified needs of social post groups and people's lifelong development, which can be seen from the revised classification of international education standards by UNESCO 1997. From zero-level preschool education to six-level postgraduate education, secondary education began to be divided into different types: vocational, general and comprehensive; In the stage of higher education, higher vocational education and undergraduate education are two kinds of higher education side by side, rather than having high and low advantages and disadvantages. (Figure 1)

In any country in the world, only a few people can get academic degrees from ordinary schools. In the whole labor market, pre-service vocational education, on-the-job training, job-transfer training and continuing education, from higher vocational colleges to professional postgraduate degrees, are actually stronger and stronger advantages in professional and vocational education and training, which is the general trend of division of labor of human resources under the background of economic globalization and the general trend of "grid" and "flat" employment structure in knowledge society. However, due to the influence of the traditional education model, parents, schools and social departments in China have not reached such a consensus and are not predictable enough. They still regard academic degree education as the only way to "achieve positive results" and still focus on full-time formal education. The lack of diversity and flexibility in talent training mode leads to the gap between some vocational schools and colleges in terms of school-running policy, teaching purpose, discipline and specialty, and teacher allocation. Blind convergence or conformism, lack of motivation and vitality to actively adapt to social needs, limited industrial absorption capacity in some areas, and unreasonable employment departments have led to the so-called "knowledge unemployment" or "over-education".

2. Schools and society unilaterally pursue the value bias of further education.

In recent years, the education department in China has made new progress in implementing quality education, such as curriculum reform, the construction of teachers, the informationization of education, and the conditions for running schools in rural areas. However, it also faces many difficulties. In quite a few fields, it is more inclined to instill knowledge and teaching, while ignoring personality development and ability training. Emphasis on selective inspection, ignoring the diversity of evaluation; Too much emphasis on the role of formal learning and neglect of the value of informal learning are still serious, resulting in the problem that society, schools, families and even local governments unilaterally pursue the enrollment rate. There are problems in educational ideas, contents and methods, defects in educational structure, system and system, great pressure of employment competition, and external institutional obstacles such as the tendency of high academic qualifications in the social employment system, which are intertwined in many aspects.

It is not difficult for quality education to become the text of national policies or even laws. What is difficult is to become an institutional arrangement and a voluntary action rule consciously supported by the government, schools and society.

3. Insufficient financial input and lack of resource sharing inside and outside the education system.

Over the years, although China's fiscal education funds have increased rapidly year by year, and the average annual growth rate is even higher than that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the proportion of fiscal education funds in GDP in China once rose from 2.5% in 1996 to 3.32% in 2002, reaching the highest level since the monitoring of this indicator in 1989. However, the original target of 4%, which was expected to be postponed from 2000 to 2005, was not achieved as scheduled. In particular, the economic census in 2005 increased the GDP stock by 2.3 trillion yuan. In 2004, the proportion of fiscal education funds to GDP fell to 2.79%, which was at the level of low-income countries and far below the world average of 4.4% in the same period (table 1). To some extent, this shows that the government's macro-control ability in education has weakened, which is not conducive to promoting educational equity.

Table 2 shows that during the period from 1990 to 2004, the proportion of fiscal education expenditure in total investment in China decreased from 85.6% to 6 1.7%, and the average annual growth rate was always lower than the growth rate of social education investment in the same period. In fact, the growth of education expenditure at the central level is basically guaranteed, but the problem is that local finance is not fully in place. In the past 15 years, the financial education expenditure has increased by more than 16% in seven years, the highest of which is 1994. At that time, the second national conference on education since the reform and opening up was just held, and the result was an increase of 35.38 over the previous year. The growth rate is between 10- 15% for five years and below 10% for three years. In the years when the government changed, the education funds tended to increase at a low level, such as 1998 and 2003, which were around 9- 10% respectively, but 1993 was an exception, which must be the promotion of the above outline. To some extent, this reflects the great flexibility of China's financial investment in education. The deep-seated institutional reason is that the internal and external accounts and final accounts of China's financial budget must be higher than the budget, and there are often over-budget revenues. Due to the lack of additional education mechanism according to the proportion of fiscal surplus income, there is a big gap in final accounts.

At the same time, the allocation of public education resources between regions and between urban and rural areas in China is very unbalanced. Even though the central government has increased its support for education funds in the central and western regions year by year, in 2004, 3 1 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government continued to show great differences in per capita budgetary education expenditures, and the areas with the highest financial allocations were primary schools, junior high schools, ordinary high schools and vocational schools. It is expected that this situation will not change much in the short term.

The relationship between China's school education system and social education system, as well as the relationship between education and training activities, needs to be straightened out. Affected by the interests of the market economy, the public welfare of education has weakened, and there have been dislocations and vacancies among the government, schools and various educational institutions. The school education system, social education system and formal education system are self-contained and self-enclosed, and the sharing of educational resources is not high. At present, most public schools are difficult to open to social learners on legal public holidays and school winter and summer vacations, and books, experimental equipment and practice places are all configured separately. In particular, the academic education of vocational schools is still managed and planned by different government departments, which has long been a problem of decentralized management and diversified policies. The labor department adopts different scales in the implementation of vocational qualification access system and vocational qualification certificate examination, and there is also a phenomenon of separation of vocational education planning and management within education. The daily management of education administrative departments is mostly concentrated in public schools, and the education planning of many local governments still lacks overall consideration for the development of private education.

Policy Orientation of Education Development and Reform in China

The important strategic opportunity period from now to 2020 also contains great opportunities for the development of education in China. According to the planning of China municipal government, it is predicted that at this stage, China will comprehensively consolidate and popularize the achievements of nine-year compulsory education, focus on improving the quality, promote education equity, and realize the balanced development of urban and rural areas, regions and schools; Determine the timetable for basically popularizing high school education, promote the coordinated development of ordinary high schools and secondary vocational education, and improve the overall quality of the people; Vocational education and training will face employment and market demand and have their own characteristics to ensure sustainable development; Further improve the quality of higher education, improve the development path and talent training mode; Promote the construction of a learning society according to local conditions, and areas with conditions can go faster in promoting the informationization and modernization of education.

Related to this, the government should also confirm the right and responsibility to develop public education, continue to increase financial input, further transform management functions, deepen the reform and innovation of the education system, and mobilize the whole society and the education system to make joint efforts to make China's fundamental transformation from a populous country to a powerful country in human resources as soon as possible. To this end, the policy direction of China's education development and reform mainly includes the following aspects:

1. Reaffirm the functions of formal education, informal and informal learning.

At present, the broad interpretation of lifelong learning in the world is: the sum of all kinds of training received in a person's life, including all kinds of education at all ages, such as formal, informal and informal education, as well as school education, family education and social (community) education. The European Union, Australia and so on mainly adopt a broad definition. Narrow sense of lifelong learning is: according to the change of learning environment, it mainly refers to the expanding learning environment and learning content after school education, specifically refers to informal and informal education after school education. South Korea mainly adopts the narrow concept. Although there are differences in the understanding of lifelong learning in different countries, it has not affected the transformation of lifelong learning from concept to realistic policy. (Table 4)

Starting from the basic national conditions of China, formal school education, especially public school education, will remain the pillar of a learning society. In order to realize the grand goal of lifelong learning for all, China should first promote exchanges between various formal school systems and social, cultural and educational institutions, develop and build extensive, flexible, open and diversified learning platforms or networks, and provide various learning places and opportunities to make learning more convenient for all; On the other hand, it is to reform the traditional education system and learning methods with the concept of lifelong learning, and form a legal, policy and institutional environment conducive to lifelong learning. Through the trial of "credit bank", we will record citizens' life experiences and achievements in school education, informal education and informal learning, establish a "credit bank", certify and accumulate credits for various informal education and informal achievements, strive for the recognition and support of social employers, and gradually make learning a basic right and need for every citizen's survival and development.

2. Strengthen the government's responsibility of coordinating public education and promoting educational equity.

Under the planned economy system, China once regarded education as a pure "public product" and a consumer public welfare undertaking arranged by the government. In fact, it can only benefit the urban population and maintain a very low level in rural areas. Obviously, this model can't meet the objective needs of China's modernization. In the past 20 years, China's socialist market economy system has been gradually established, and the relatively simple public education has gradually evolved into a series of "public products", "quasi-public products" and "private products", especially after the reform of management system, school-running system and investment system, it is divided into education supported by finance, education combined with financial allocation and multi-channel financing, education provided by non-financial funds and so on. After China signed WTO's Schedule of Educational Service Trade, the educational service trade with commercial nature can also be provided through Sino-foreign cooperation in running schools. Moreover, except in developed countries with high welfare, it is difficult for the government to fully pay the cost of citizens' participation in lifelong learning. Therefore, after the new changes in the nature of education, how to accurately locate the responsibilities that the government should bear has become a very urgent issue.

Judging from the demand of the current socialist market economic system reform, in the process of building a well-off society in an all-round way and building a harmonious socialist society, it will be an extremely important policy direction to effectively transform government functions and give full play to the functions of "economic regulation, market supervision, social management and public service" in accordance with the requirements of the central authorities. Due to the retreat from the competitive economy, the government has become a qualified referee from being both an athlete and a referee. At present, governments at all levels in China should have the conditions and ability to undertake more and more responsibilities in the field of public education.

Within the framework of a sound market economy system and public finance system, the government's educational responsibility embodies a characteristic, that is, it tends to promote educational equity. However, in some areas of our country, the phenomenon of intentionally or unintentionally misreading or misinterpreting the government's educational responsibility occurs from time to time, which is mainly reflected in simply comparing the practice of economic system reform, shirking the obligation of public finance to support educational equity, and giving up the legal responsibility for public education, especially compulsory education, on the pretext of so-called "educational industrialization" and "educational marketization". As a result, in many areas with financial constraints, the expanded educational resources after the so-called public education transformation have not benefited the low-and middle-income groups, which runs counter to the new construction direction of the "public service" government. Any experiment of public education reform in China in the future, if it cannot effectively increase the interests of the disadvantaged groups, at least it should not harm their original interests. Once damaged, there is a corresponding repair and compensation mechanism, and the government must bear enough responsibility for it.

In the future, a key issue facing China's education development is the direction and intensity of the transformation of government functions, that is, the reasonable positioning of government responsibilities in the fields of social management and public services. The government can choose different approaches according to different educational fields. First, take the initiative, focusing on free nine-year compulsory education, promoting the balanced development of regional basic education, ensuring the demand for national defense construction and major engineering talents, ensuring the basic learning and development rights of vulnerable groups, and embodying social equity with educational equity; The second is to "do something", choose basic disciplines, remote and hard industries, and some educational fields that are related to public interests and the market is not standardized, and give stable and effective support; The third is "entrusted action", which chooses the education field that the government should do but cannot do, or explicitly entrusts it to the third department or private institutions to improve efficiency; Fourth, "no action is needed", social participation and necessary competition mechanism are introduced, and the government only needs to formulate rules and supervision. Moreover, the government's promotion of educational equity must also include the fairness of rules and supervision.

3. Strengthen the supervision of non-compulsory education investment benefit and the evaluation of education quality.

At present, under the situation that the scale of education is expanding and the financial support ability is lagging behind, some areas of our country even offset the financial allocation with tuition and miscellaneous fees, set aside normal education fees, and set up special projects at any time, so the distribution and use of education funds are very arbitrary. Judging from the behavior of public schools in some areas, the financial management system is not perfect, such as lending to commercial banks, owing to construction units, charging fees under various excuses, and not disclosing the income and expenditure to the society truthfully. The "absence" of government financial allocation leads to the "offside" of school fees, which is one of the reasons why arbitrary charges for public education in some areas have been repeatedly banned.

At the same time, the quality of non-compulsory education has also aroused widespread concern. Especially after the large-scale expansion of higher education in China, although the total number of students ranks first in the world, the gross enrollment rate still ranks above 70 in the world due to the huge school-age population base, and the layout structure, average school scale, student level and expenditure structure of colleges and universities have changed to varying degrees. One of the bad signals is that the average budget of college students in China is decreasing year by year: 73 10 yuan in 2000, 68 16 yuan in 2006, 6 178 yuan in 2002, 5,773 yuan in 2003 and 5,553 yuan in 2004. At the same time, the level of tuition fees has not risen sharply, and as a result, the total training expenses have decreased, which can be expected to cause public doubts about the quality of teaching. The quality of education will be a key issue in the future. It is not the government's guidance on how to position and improve the quality of schools, but the inevitable choice for the future survival and sustainable development of schools. It is predicted that by 2020, when the gross enrollment rate of high schools in China is close to 90% and the gross enrollment rate of higher education is close to 40%, the contradiction between quantity and quality will be more prominent, which may force some public or private schools to "shuffle".

Public schools are institutions that provide public services, and the government is the manager of public services. In the future, China must clarify the rights and responsibilities of the allocation and use of financial funds between public schools and education administrative departments, improve and strictly implement the financial system, and improve the system of financial disclosure and school affairs disclosure. The audit conclusions of education administrative departments and schools should be reported to the government and the National People's Congress and made public, and the investment, distribution and use of public education funds should be placed under public supervision. At the same time, with the exploration and experiment of modern school system, China will clearly distinguish the behavior boundaries of government, school and society in the field of public education, and the government will manage, allocate funds, guide and serve according to national administrative and educational laws and regulations; The school has the qualification of a legal person, and independently regulates running schools according to law. In addition, we should introduce more elements of social supervision, establish a mechanism combining government entrusted evaluation, school self-evaluation, social intermediary evaluation and public participation evaluation, and improve the education quality evaluation and monitoring system.

4. Promote the construction of a learning society based on the basic national conditions of China.

According to the OECD report, the level of wealth and financial education funds in most OECD countries is much higher than that in China, but their citizens' participation in lifelong learning is still mainly oriented towards earning a living and employment, especially activities with high personal returns, while learning driven by leisure, interests and hobbies can only be a tributary. Usually, lifelong learning activities are mostly carried out in regular schools, enterprise training departments and jobs. Therefore, to build a learning society, the age and identity differences of learners will gradually fade away. In order to build a learning society in China, we must find a suitable starting point in line with the basic national conditions. China citizens' participation in lifelong learning and building a learning society is bound to increasingly reflect the characteristics of earning a living as the main driving force.

At present, there are two social strata in China, namely "the working class including intellectuals and peasants" and six social strata, namely "entrepreneurs and technicians of private scientific and technological enterprises, management technicians employed by foreign-funded enterprises, self-employed, private entrepreneurs, employees of intermediary organizations, freelancers and other social strata". However, universities in China have entered the threshold of "popularization". However, many ideas are still in the "elite" stage, which mainly cultivates intellectuals and disdains self-employed, private entrepreneurs, intermediary organizations, employees and freelancers. As everyone knows, these people are struggling in the fierce market economy competition, and they have great demand for the continuing education that universities can provide, and they also have enough ability to pay the cost. Ignoring their needs will be a great loss. At the same time, since China has confidence in building a world-class research university, it should also have confidence in building a world-class vocational school and training center. Vocational education in China should have its own characteristics, not only to meet the needs of fresh graduates from ordinary schools, but also to expand its vision to other groups in society, including training workers to change jobs, making farmers rich, and transferring services to towns or non-agricultural industries to achieve greater coverage, so that its vitality will be stronger.

At present, the living standard of urban and rural residents in China is still not high. In some areas, the proportion of low-and middle-income families is high, and vocational education is still in a weak position. Vocational and technical training for rural laborers who work in cities is also a relatively weak link. From the model of the World Bank, if public education services can benefit poor learners and cannot be completely regulated by the market, there may be three ways: first, basic schools or vocational schools that provide basic knowledge and skills training, and the government needs to provide basic funding and financial subsidies to poor learners as much as possible; Second, education with a certain market return rate should be subsidized by the government through discount loans or scholarships; Third, there is a high market return rate, and the government should provide full financial assistance to poor learners with excellent grades. With the improvement of the socialist market economy system and public finance system, the China Municipal Government will surely assume more responsibilities in subsidizing the disadvantaged groups to receive lifelong learning including vocational education and training.