With the progress of the world economy and society relying more and more on knowledge, technology, skills and abilities, human resources will become the decisive factor for a country to survive in the global market. Under this new social and historical condition, truly meeting the basic learning needs of all children, adolescents and adults is a necessary means for all countries in the world to narrow the gap and promote all-round social progress.
In the past two or three years, under the leadership of UNESCO, great attention has been paid to meeting the special educational needs of the vulnerable groups that have not yet been touched. These untouched groups include ethnic and religious minorities, nomadic tribes, people in remote islands or mountainous areas, immigrants, refugees, street children and child laborers, and a large number of poor or special children. The existing experience shows that just expanding the existing education system and adopting conventional education methods are not suitable for their needs, lifestyles and ideals. Expanding educational means, realizing educational diversification, especially designing new teaching models to meet the special educational needs of service groups will be the only way to truly popularize basic education.
Broadly speaking, meeting the special educational needs of different groups is also a basic direction of basic education in the new century. Even in industrialized countries where basic education is almost universal, functional illiteracy among young people and adults still shows that their education is inadequate and incomplete. Education takes the promotion of human development as the core, and basic education is the basis for everyone to master their own destiny and the "passport" for everyone to move towards life. Therefore, a tailor-made education plan for each other will maximize learners' learning potential and their ability to contribute to society in the future.
2. Continue to improve the quality of basic education, paying special attention to the relevance of education.
In the new century, countries around the world will continue to pay attention to those reforms that have been proved to be beneficial to improving the quality of basic education. However, we must establish a new concept of quality, that is, we should not only pay attention to the quality of formal school education, but also ensure the teaching quality of other forms of education, such as various forms of informal education. At the same time, the standard of measuring quality should not be limited to academic performance, but should be extended to whether the education provided by schools or other forms of education meets the needs of learners, whether learning is useful, and whether it is relevant and targeted.
In the new world, the benefits of education will be paid more attention than efficiency. This means that the reform of the education system and the reform of teaching content will undergo fundamental changes, the chronic educational diseases that are incompatible with social development, especially with local needs, will be effectively solved, and the educational waste of students who cannot find jobs or serve the community after graduation will be gradually reduced. In the reform of the education system, the participation of local or community and parents and the autonomy of running schools will be generally valued; Educational content will break the traditional division of disciplines and tend to be open, comprehensive and targeted, with equal emphasis on knowledge and life skills. In those countries that have begun to re-examine their education systems, people think that the key to successful reform is to attach importance to grassroots participation and school autonomy. Even those countries that have implemented the decentralization system for a long time, such as the United States and Britain, have gradually strengthened the management and control of education by the central government since the 1980s, while paying attention to giving schools more autonomy and expanding parents' right to participate in education and choose party schools. At present, the "charter schools" and "autonomous direct subsidy schools" that are emerging in the United States and Britain are good examples in practice.
3. Continue to deepen the reform of curriculum structure and teaching content.
The reform of the curriculum structure and content of basic education is still the highlight of the current and future world basic education reform. Its motivation and demand come from two aspects: first, the rapid growth of knowledge, the renewal of knowledge and the dissemination of new knowledge become inevitable; Second, the relationship between education and social and economic development is getting closer and closer. Education has the responsibility to cultivate all kinds of talents to meet the needs of society. Education, especially the responsibility of teaching students to explore knowledge and judge the value of knowledge, and curriculum is the medium.
The central problems of curriculum reform include: first, how to ensure the comprehensiveness and relevance of curriculum content without increasing the burden of curriculum; Secondly, under the premise of not losing the long-term goal of spreading excellent human culture and values, how to make the curriculum actively respond to current new social problems, such as population, environment and health; Thirdly, how to meet the diverse interests of different learners under the premise of ensuring the consistency and focus of the content; Fourthly, how to define the core curriculum and how to ensure that the defined basic ability can be effectively applied to future life in the realistic environment where science and technology are increasingly becoming a part of culture.
These problems are common challenges faced by education curriculum reform at all levels, and the basic education curriculum reform should also pay attention to the following problems. First, pay attention to the study of basic knowledge. Although technology is changing with each passing day, basic knowledge has always been the basis and tool for a person to continue his studies. Therefore, it should have a considerable reanalysis position in the curriculum structure and remain relatively stable. Second, grasp the principles of the future curriculum structure. The curriculum structure should be based on a country's social, ethnic, cultural and educational historical traditions, proceed from its own reality, and strive for the best choice that best suits its own needs and development. Therefore, in a word, in the face of complicated knowledge and information in the future, we should pay enough attention to how to optimize the curriculum structure: properly handle the relationship between compulsory courses and elective courses; Pay attention to the organic combination of science curriculum and humanities; According to the changes of science and technology and social development in the new century, adjust the course content; Attach importance to giving students diversified factors and international understanding education. The adjustment and change of curriculum structure, fundamentally speaking, serves the transformation of talent training mode.
4, continue to improve and perfect the evaluation and assessment methods.
Establishing an evaluation system to promote students' all-round development is one of the important tasks to improve the quality of education in the 2 1 century. In the last two or three decades of this century, there have been two completely different trends in the evaluation of basic education. One is that the major developed countries in Europe and America have gradually changed the traditional practice of downplaying the quality assessment of primary and secondary education and teaching, and instead paid attention to the strict assessment and evaluation of students' academic performance. For example, since the promulgation of the 1998 education reform law, Britain has not only implemented a unified curriculum nationwide, but also conducted a unified national examination and evaluation of four so-called "key stages" of compulsory education: 7 years old, 1 1 year old, 14 years old and 16 years old. Since the promulgation and implementation of Goal 2000: American Education Strategy, the United States has also put forward the goals of American education, and unified the education standards and examination system at the state level. However, in Russia, China and some countries in the Asia-Pacific region, due to the long-term strict examination system, scores have become the only standard to measure students' academic performance and even the quality of the whole school education. This over-emphasis on scores has gradually exposed its drawbacks. Both students and teachers focus on scores, which stifles students' interest and passion in learning and stifles students' initiative and creativity. How to establish an effective, reasonable and scientific evaluation system and make evaluation a necessary means to improve the quality of education and promote the healthy development of students is an important topic that all countries in the world are actively exploring.
In the cooperative pedagogy theory established by the former Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, the substantive evaluation of students' learning put forward by educator and psychologist monash Willi can be said to be a challenge to the traditional evaluation methods. In the long-term educational experiment, monash Willy made a substantial evaluation (no score evaluation) on the lower grades of primary school. The substantive evaluation focused on stimulating students' intrinsic learning motivation, enhancing students' confidence and finding the goal of further study and improvement. At present, in most primary schools in Russia, students in grades 1-4 are often assessed by comments. Generally speaking, in the education facing the 2 1 century, how to make students get the greatest success in education and teaching activities is the first problem to be concerned about when establishing the evaluation and examination system.
5. As the starting point of lifelong learning-the new focus of basic education.
At present, with the increasing penetration of knowledge and information into all aspects of people's daily life, lifelong learning has changed from an ideal to a reality. Due to the different stages of development, countries all over the world are moving towards a learning society with different steps, and learning has become an important factor related to future progress.
As a necessary means to meet lifelong learning, basic education has a new meaning and mission. From the whole process of lifelong learning, basic education is called "enlightenment education" by the current international education circle, that is, the starting point of lifelong learning. The view from the 2 1 century International Education Committee holds that: "Good enlightenment education is the key to start lifelong learning. This kind of education should cover children's cognitive and emotional development, ensure that all teenagers master the basic knowledge and skills of sword flute, and at the same time develop their attitude and ability to learn new knowledge-learn to learn. "
In its report "Education ―― Wealth of Spring" submitted to UNESCO, the Education Committee of the International 265438+20th Century put forward the "four pillars" of education facing the future information society, and considered them as the knowledge pillars of everyone's life, namely, learning to recognize, learn to do things, learn to live together and learn to survive. Learning to recognize has always been valued by education in various countries. However, in the information society where knowledge is expanding, it will become more important to choose and use knowledge. Arns, a senior official in charge of UNESCO's basic education for a long time, summed up the problems that should be paid attention to in basic education in a future-oriented learning society. He said: "Educational systems around the world have made progress in imparting knowledge vocabulary and computing skills, but they have not made much progress in the third major area, namely life skills, social skills and values. Although the 20th century has produced a generation of experts in the field of computer and knowledge development, these experts are not so perfect in values, life skills and tolerance and respect for diversity. It can be said that the failure of education in this century is not the failure of science, language and mathematics teaching, but the failure of advocating peaceful coexistence of human beings and the failure of exploring individual and social potential to achieve full and equal development. " It can be seen that how to learn to study and moral education is a problem that the world's basic education should pay serious attention to.