(1) Holistic education focuses on fully exploring everyone's intelligence, emotion, sociality, materiality, artistry, creativity and potential.
Compared with previous educational ideas, the most prominent feature of contemporary holistic education thought lies in its educational purpose. Education is not a simple social ruling tool, and people are no longer mechanical individuals driven by economic interests. The idea of holistic education first raises people's understanding to an unprecedented height, and its core content is the cultivation of "holistic". Literally, a holistic person can be regarded as a person with complete personality and all-round development. In the process of human development, no one can be biased. Ron Miller put forward the concept of holistic paradigm, and thought that spirituality is superior to materiality in terms of the whole person's essence, and education should pay more attention to people's inner feelings, such as emotion, creativity, imagination, compassion and curiosity. , especially self-realization. This holistic paradigm theory does not belittle the importance of material and deny the value of social existence, but believes that the process of education is not only the transmission of knowledge and the training of skills, but also the comprehensive cultivation of people's inner emotional experience and personality, so as to achieve the unity of people's spirit and material.
(2) Holistic education seeks the understanding between people and the true meaning of life.
Previous education usually separated social relations and cultural background, and the final result of education was to cultivate utilitarians who only cared about the narrow scope around them and lacked understanding and respect for others. Traditional education pays attention to competition, regardless of examination competition or activity competition, it ignores the cultivation of students' interpersonal understanding ability. In this case, others just satisfy their own tools and become the object of self-will utilization and competition. Only when there is a materialized relationship between people, human nature will fall into constant decline. Holistic education encourages self-realization, but it also emphasizes sincere interpersonal communication and cross-cultural human understanding. People are human because they live in interrelated organic social groups. This connection is not mechanized, but lively interpersonal communication. The embodiment of human nature is not competition, but cooperation. In the process of implementing holistic education, students are required to deepen the experience of cooperative spirit, cultivate the quality of mutual understanding and care between people, and further deepen interpersonal communication in life into cross-cultural understanding and trust of human beings, thus strengthening students' global consciousness.
(C) Holistic education emphasizes the cultivation of students' humanistic spirit
Whole-person educators are deeply influenced by contemporary humanistic educational thoughts when they think about how to shape students' sound personality and improve their way of thinking. Since the human society entered the industrial age, the traditional education that attaches importance to classical humanities has declined day by day, and scientism has become the dominant culture in all campuses. It is undeniable that in the era of rapid development of science and technology, it is of great significance to pay attention to the teaching of practical knowledge and the cultivation of ability. This mode of education has also greatly promoted the progress of social productive forces and technological innovation, but at the same time, many inevitable disadvantages of itself have gradually emerged. Because school education pays too much attention to practical knowledge, ignores the study of humanities courses such as literature and art, and even regards many humanities courses as useless things, the school is full of the atmosphere of quick success and instant benefit. Students lack humanistic care, correct values about world development, and concern and thinking about things around them. They just become tools for material production, and schools become "factories" for making these tools. People are a whole. Although knowledge education is important, it is only a part of people. Besides knowledge education, there are many other parts that cannot be ignored.
Holistic educators do not deny the important role of scientific knowledge in the era of knowledge explosion, but advocate more infiltration of humanistic spirit in school education. Ron Miller's theory directly puts forward that holistic education is to achieve the goal of holistic development through humanistic education. To carry out this humanistic spirit, we should pay attention to two principles: first, holistic education is a "balanced" learning experience after "integration" in the fields of intellectual cognition and emotion, which is provided for the educated to develop themselves; Second, the foundation of holistic education lies in trust. Trust in people's development, through "integrated" educational methods and contents, will surely lead people to goodness, harmony and continuous growth. In view of the lack of humanistic spirit in current school education, holistic education advocates cultivating humanistic spirit and perfect personality in all parts and links of education. One of the important aspects is to vigorously promote the general education curriculum. Scholars from the United States, Canada and other countries have made outstanding achievements in the exploration of holistic education. One of the reasons is that they have a good general education soil to find the implementation path of holistic education in the field of practice. General education conforms to the essential spirit of cultivating people's integrity and is a shortcut to implement people-oriented thought. However, it should be noted that if there is no infiltration of humanistic spirit and the cultivation of people's basic character in the general education curriculum, then this kind of education is doomed to fail to achieve the fundamental purpose of holistic education. General education with holistic education as its ultimate ideal should help students understand the reasons why people are human beings, all kinds of eternal problems, the characteristics of the times and the difficulties they face. In a word, only by deeply understanding the importance of personality, individuality and thinking can we really cultivate a rational, humanistic, moral and spiritual person.
(d) Holistic education encourages interdisciplinary interaction and knowledge integration.
If school education is completely subject-oriented and cultivates students' knowledge of a single subject, then educators will completely ignore that our world is a rapidly changing, complex and organically linked system. Holistic educators believe that the current school education artificially separates all kinds of knowledge, the disciplines are isolated from each other, and the world is divided into countless pieces, which directly leads to the one-sided development of people and the isolation of thinking mode. Interdisciplinary comprehensive study of general education has become an important way to realize holistic education. Einstein once said, "It is not enough to educate people with professional knowledge, because professional education can make people become useful machines, but not harmonious people." Holistic education emphasizes interdisciplinary comprehensive learning. Obviously, no subject, subject or factor can solve the problems related to the development of today's world alone. Only through the interaction, influence and infiltration between disciplines, beyond the various restrictions between disciplines, can we broaden our horizons of learning and studying new knowledge and truly restore the whole world.
(e) Holistic education advocates the balance between students' spiritual world and material world, and pays attention to the harmony and pleasure of life.
In the report "Learn to Live-Today and Tomorrow in the Education World", UNESCO pointed out: "In order to meet the needs of science and specialization, the training for many young people should be full and comprehensive, but it has always been incomplete. Training for a certain content or an inefficient job overestimates the importance of improving technical ability and hurts other more human qualities. " "Holistic education" changes the present education from "doing things" to "shaping the future", advocates "educating people" and emphasizes the development of people's rationality, emotion, body and mind, aesthetic feeling, creativity and spiritual potential as the educational purpose. The importance of matter is undeniable, but people are important because they are individuals with complex spiritual worlds. This spiritual element has a strong influence on social stability, human living and working in peace and contentment and other material environments. In modern society, material development changes with each passing day, but people gradually become slaves of material, money and fame. The purpose of education is distorted into learning a trade and getting rich. It is against this materialized view of education that holistic educators advocate that in the process of cultivating people, we should not only pay attention to the material world, but also pay attention to the fun of learning, the harmony of communication with people and the cultivation of good self-character.
(6) Holistic education cultivates global citizens with integrated thinking.
The biggest feature of holistic education is "wholeness", which not only means cultivating people's all-round quality, but also contains a broad world outlook. This world outlook poses a severe challenge to various contemporary societies, transcending individuals and small groups, and interweaving people with nature, society and themselves. Holistic educators are not concerned about the development of a person, a school or a country, but link the whole earth and even the whole universe from a broader perspective. When talking about the educational direction of 2 1 century, Miller thinks that the educational demand in the new century is difficult to observe under the current educational model, and the future education must emphasize the global view, ecological view and spiritual world view. In addition, the whole-person education scholars represented by Miller believe that all arguments involving people and their lives basically have their "relevance". This educational concept inevitably requires the cultivation of global citizens who care about the environment, peace and all mankind. Only in this way can education really achieve its due purpose.