First, the daily usage of education.
In daily life, people often use the word "education". These usages can be roughly divided into three categories: one is "education" as a process, indicating a profound process of ideological transformation, such as "education" in "I got a profound education from this film"; One is "education" as a method, such as "education" in "Your child is really promising, how do you educate"; The other is "education" as a social system, such as "education is the foundation of revitalizing local economy". For future educators, it is far from enough to have only perceptual educational concepts.
Second, the etymology of education
Because of the continuous development of education itself, people's understanding of education is also deepening, so the significance of education is also developing and deepening. Under the cultural background of China, the words "teaching" and "learning" are generally regarded as the etymology of education. In Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jin Wenzhong, "teaching" means "teaching", the lower part means children as the object of education, the lower left part means divination activities as the teaching content, the lower right part means hands, and the upper right part means whips or sticks, which is the process and means of teaching. The whole word is like someone holding a whip to urge a child to learn; "Learning" means "learning". The upper left and the upper right represent two hands, the upper middle represents divination activities, the middle represents the learning place-room, and the lower represents children. The whole word means that children learn relevant knowledge in the house. "Teaching" and "learning" describe education from different angles. Literally, the word "education" first appeared in the sentence "Educate the world's talents, enjoy three pleasures" in Mencius. Shuo Wen Jie Zi says: "Teaching is what you do from above, and what you do below is also effective" and "Educating and raising children makes you do good". But in ancient Chinese, people seldom used these two words as one word. Most ancient books in the pre-Qin period only used one word "teach", such as The Doctrine of the Mean, Xunzi's Self-cultivation and Xue Ji. People who teach well will learn from their mistakes. Many words related to "teaching" here are mostly "learning", which is often used to talk about "teaching" or "teaching". For example, Xue Ji, the earliest educational work in ancient China, is actually "teaching record" or "educational theory", and the department established in the late Qing Dynasty is the Ministry of Education. 19 At the end of the 20th century, "teaching" and "learning" in Chinese were replaced by "education".
The etymological study of education under the background of western culture shows that in western languages, the word education in English, French and German all evolved from the Latin word "educare", which means "educare". It can be seen that the word "education" in western languages means guiding the inner things of the educated. Specifically, education is a kind of human social practice that guides the inherent talent, endowment, ability, wisdom and virtue of the educated through appropriate ways, methods, channels and media.
Third, the definition of "education"
Education is a social activity to cultivate people, which is the fundamental difference between education and all other social phenomena. Compared with other human social activities, education is conscious, and its direct goal is to influence people's physical and mental development. Usually divided into broad sense and narrow sense.
Education in a broad sense refers to all activities that purposefully enhance people's knowledge and skills, improve people's cognitive ability, influence people's ideology and morality, enhance people's physique and improve people's personality. The broad definition of education includes school education and all kinds of education outside the school, and its forms include organized and unorganized, planned and unplanned, systematic and unsystematic, externally instilled and self-improved. Such as classroom teaching, reading books, watching movies, listening to reports and "taking the Wan Li Road".
Education in a narrow sense refers to school education. That is, educators, according to the requirements of social development, follow the laws of the physical and mental development of the younger generation, and exert influence on the physical and mental development of the educated in a targeted, planned and organized way in a specific educational place, so that their physical and mental development is in the direction of social expectations. School education is a form of education after the development of human society to a certain historical stage, covering all school education in ancient and modern times, at home and abroad. Compared with education in a broad sense, school education has obvious characteristics of specialization and institutionalization. The same concepts juxtaposed with school education include family education and social education.
There is a saying in China that it takes ten years to plant trees and a hundred years to educate people, which reveals the fundamental value of education, that is, to provide the country with talents with lofty beliefs, noble morality, honesty and law-abiding, exquisite skills and erudition, and to create scientific knowledge and material wealth for the country, family and society, thus promoting economic growth, national prosperity, world peace and human development.