Good education means that children grow up to be gentlemen, and the purpose of education is to cultivate gentlemen. A gentleman must be "a man of virtue, utility and ability" and have four qualities: "virtue, wisdom, courtesy and learning". "What a gentleman needs is career knowledge, manners consistent with his identity, and at the same time, he should be able to make himself a famous figure in China according to his own identity, which is beneficial to the country." All these reflected the requirements of the British aristocratic bourgeois rulers for their children at that time, requiring them to have moral thoughts and behaviors that were understood and demanded by the upper class; Have extensive ability to explore the cause of capitalism, agility and self-confidence; Good at communicating with people, and have noble and civilized manners and manners in various social occasions; And it has the characteristics of wide knowledge and resourcefulness. Therefore, to cultivate a gentleman is to cultivate bourgeois entrepreneurs who can meet the needs of a happy life and promote the development of capitalism. It can be said that the theory of "gentleman education" is specially used to train a new generation of rulers.
In the way of gentleman education, Locke insists that the cultivation of gentleman can never be carried out through school education, but only through good family education. Children must be brought up by their fathers or good tutors. He believes that "rudeness and evil are popular everywhere" in society, and young people will be "infected" and lose "purity" when they go to school. In addition, Locke also believes that grammar schools at that time only taught some knowledge of Greek and Latin, but did not pay attention to the cultivation of students' morality, etiquette and modesty, so it was not practical. Moreover, the family habits of many students in the school and their parents' personalities are also very complicated and uneven. The young gentlemen here "associate with urchins every day and do everything they can to fight counterfeiting", so they drift with the tide and can't develop good ideology and morality. On the other hand, Locke also opposes young people's frequent contact with "uncultured and immoral" "inferior servants" to avoid learning vulgar "words, tricks and bad habits" from them. Therefore, Locke strongly advocates that all families who have the ability to hire tutors should pay a large price to hire people with good character, rich social practice experience and good cultural quality as tutors in order to achieve good educational results. "Compared with anyone in the school, a tutor is bound to make his son elegant and resolute, and at the same time know what is valuable and appropriate, and it is easier to learn and mature faster. In a word, you can't learn much about the qualities that a young gentleman should have in school.
Locke's opposition to school education reflects the traditional class prejudice of British aristocrats in attaching importance to family education since the Middle Ages. He thought that the poor quality and complicated thoughts of the students in grammar schools that only recruited the children of the ruling class at that time would have a bad influence on gentlemen. This shows his discrimination against general school education.
No matter from Locke's emphasis on the role of education in human development, the role of education in national development and his proposition on the purpose of education, we can see that these educational concepts are closely related to his class and political intentions and have class limitations. But what is worthy of recognition is that his educational theory is also scientific and reasonable.
The gentleman education advocated by Locke is the education of cultivating the successors of the ruling class, not the education of the whole people, which is limited by the limitations of his time. With the social, economic and cultural progress, education has been chosen by the international community as one of the important means to solve global problems and meet cross-century challenges. Therefore, expanding education and even popularizing the object of education has become the trend of education development in all countries of the world. With regard to the background of education for all, we will analyze it from three levels: individual, society or country and world development, so that the level will be clear.
First of all, from the perspective of personal development, universal education is not only the fundamental guarantee for every member of society to enjoy the right and opportunity to receive education and achieve social equality, but also the basic means for individuals to acquire the ability to survive and develop. An important symbol of modern civilization is social equality, and the core of social equality is human equality, which depends on the equal education that society can give them. It can be said that this constitutes the most important theoretical basis of national education with political significance. France believes: "If the school itself cannot eliminate the inequality that marks the living conditions of children and young people, then it should contribute to equality of opportunity." In fact, this equality of educational opportunities will inevitably change people's political, economic and cultural status, including the inequality of living conditions, to a certain extent.
Secondly, from the social or national level, education for all is not only the inevitable result of social and economic progress, but also the inevitable choice for society and the country to get out of crisis, get rid of poverty and achieve prosperity. After the industrial revolution, large-scale industrial production promoted the knowledge of labor and the increasing socialization of production. The result of the scientific and technological revolution has further changed the structure of the labor force, which also puts forward higher cultural and technical requirements for workers, otherwise the large-scale production society will be damaged by the low quality of producers. Education for all is just to meet the requirements of mass production in modern society. It is predicted that the average speed of mastering new technologies will be accelerated by 50% and the number of people who put forward reasonable suggestions will increase by 6% every year when the level of educational science and technology in schools is improved. Therefore, Marxist materialism holds that "the popularization of compulsory education in modern capitalist countries is neither the realization of' natural human rights' nor the universal illumination of bourgeois humanity, but the objective requirement of socialized mass production for the technical and cultural quality of workers and the inevitable product of the formation and development of capitalist mode of production." In fact, the premise of any social progress is that every member of this society should receive a certain degree of education, because education determines the fate of the whole society or the whole nation by determining the fate of one person.
We say that universal education is the need to promote world civilization and common prosperity. Because of the global nature of economic, technological and population problems, it is beyond the capacity of one or two countries to solve any problems. Only through coordinated international actions of all countries in the world can global problems be solved and the interests of all mankind be guaranteed. Under such social conditions, it is necessary for us to look at education from a global perspective, so that education is no longer just a means to meet the needs of individuals and countries. It not only needs to make poor and backward countries get rid of poverty and backwardness and gradually transition to prosperity through universal education, but also needs to cultivate people's global awareness and improve the comprehensive quality of world citizens through educating all members of mankind on peaceful cooperation, participation in unity, eco-environmental protection and sympathy and understanding. Eliminating inequality and instability among countries and regions in the world and taking concerted action on a global scale-universal education is the only way out. Of course, the emergence of education for all comes not only from the development needs of individuals, society, countries and even the world, but also from the change of ideas, economic development and technological progress, which provide a strong spiritual motivation and material guarantee for education for all.
All-round education is the popularization of educational objects, that is, education must be open to all, and everyone has the right to receive education and must receive a certain degree of education. In short, education for all contains the following connotations: first, the democratization of education; Second, the popularization of education.
1, democratization of education
In the scope of educational reform, people realize that the development of education should not only focus on the academic system of ordinary schools and universities, as in the 1960s and 1970s, but should first meet the basic needs of most poor people through reform and transformation. With the increasing role of education in the whole society, the scope and purpose of education are no longer regarded as the achievements and gains of a few individuals, but should bear permanent obligations for every member of society. Among the goals of education reform in 1980s, a breakthrough education reform aims at eliminating the unique educational inequality in the education system in 1960s and 1970s. These inequalities include: unequal distribution of educational resources, unequal growth rate of educational infrastructure, unequal educational level and achievement, and unequal status of educational diplomas and certificates. Secondly, there are also a series of educational inequalities that must be changed within the country, such as the inequality of educational equipment allocated to towns and rural areas in each country, the inequality of treatment between men and women in adult education, and the class prejudice in the formal school education system.
In the 1980s, the above social factors not only strengthened our world with unparalleled rapid changes in the past, but also made our existing knowledge system inconsistent with social reality and faced with institutional breakthroughs. What needs our attention more is the resulting problem that "inequality may deepen in the moral and spiritual fields, exploitation may be more extensive, and injustice may be more serious". Based on such changes, the essence of education reform lies in making education an independent social variable, which can solve the inequality problem and promote and embody a growing and fair society.
In fact, education democratization, as the mainstream of international education reform in 1980s, has been accepted by developed and developing countries, and has become a consensus. The essence of the so-called democratization of education is that the state must politically or legally ensure that all members of society, regardless of their status, race, gender, etc., have unlimited educational opportunities. This expression actually contains two meanings: everyone has the right to education; Everyone is equal before educational opportunities. The most important way to strive for the democratization of education is to realize the equality of educational opportunities.
In some developed countries, due to the early pursuit of democratic politics and good economic foundation, the efforts to equalize educational opportunities are earlier and stronger than those in other countries. In developing countries, democratization of education is becoming the direction and goal of reform in various countries. In addition, in both developed and developing countries, we have noticed the quality problem of educational democratization and put forward a higher goal of educational democratization: not only equal educational opportunities, but also equal educational effects.
2. Popularization of education
The popularization of education can be said to be the basic guarantee for the democratization of education. Without the popularization of education, there can be no equal educational opportunities. Only by achieving universal education can everyone enjoy equal educational opportunities. Only when everyone gets a proper education can we say that this society has moved towards equality, because the equality of educational opportunities is the most basic standard of social equality. However, the popularization of education has encountered many obstacles. Under the social conditions of unequal political, economic status and family background, it is unrealistic to pursue absolute education democratization and equality of educational opportunities under the condition that conditional discrimination has not been eliminated. To realize the popularization of education, we must rely on the establishment of compulsory education laws and regulations, which is compulsory education. Therefore, an important way to popularize education is to establish a compulsory education system.
The so-called compulsory education is: a certain number of years and a certain degree of basic education for children of a certain age range by the state according to the law. China scholars understand compulsory education from five aspects: the state has the obligation to make laws to force the school-age population to receive education; The state has the obligation to open schools, appoint teachers and provide teaching materials to facilitate children's enrollment; Children and adolescents have the opportunity to attend school and receive education at school age; Parents are obliged to send their children to school for education; Society has the obligation to pay taxes or raise funds to set up schools and develop education.
Education for all has become one of the most influential educational thoughts in the contemporary era, leading the current international educational reform and efforts, reflecting the development trend of future educational progress, and is one of the most ambitious goals of world education. However, there are still many difficulties to achieve the goal of education for all, and we must have a clear understanding and efforts.