Rereading Zhang Xuemen's Collection of Early Childhood Education today, I deeply feel that the master's thoughts are profound and profound, full of sense of the times and freshness, which has important guiding significance for the current preschool education in China, and at the same time encourages us to strengthen our confidence, continue to explore on the road of civilian preschool education, and promote the deepening of educational reform.
First, from the social reality, re-take the road of advanced civilian early childhood education.
Early childhood educators should pay attention to social practical problems and devote themselves to reform practice. In the turbulent historical era of the rise and fall of the nation, Mr. Zhang's naive education thought has a strong sense of the times, and clearly puts forward "transforming national naive education", without talking about education, considering the development prospects of the country and the nation, and paying attention to the function of preschool education to transform society. It is believed that the highest purpose of children's education is to cultivate new people. Mr. Zhang Xuemen proposed to rely on children to build a new society and a new world.
As a preschool teacher, Zhang Xuemen has a very broad vision of concern and research, and is committed to the establishment and construction of preschool education for civilians. In view of China's national conditions, he stressed that the development of early childhood education should be based on local conditions, take local materials according to actual conditions and needs, attach importance to the training of early childhood teachers, organize various forms of normal classes or schools, and implement the tutorial system, so as to practice and innovate early childhood education in China.
Before War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, when Zhang Xuemen presided over the kindergarten in Beiping, he borrowed several kindergartens in Beiping (at that time, kindergartens in Beiping were mostly half-day and didn't have classes in the afternoon) to open civilian kindergartens to recruit some poor children to enter the park free of charge and let kindergarten teachers engage in teaching practice. He also founded the experimental area of rural education to explore new ways to popularize rural preschool education and new ways and methods to train preschool teachers. The kindergarten teachers he sponsored have a clear training goal, that is, they can devote themselves to popularizing civilian preschool education and training a new generation of citizens in rural preschool education. [ 1]
Objectively speaking, today's preschool education system for workers and peasants in China was established after the founding of New China, and it was first developed in cities. However, the long-term tendency of urban subjects and the dual socio-economic structure between urban and rural areas have widened the gap between urban and rural areas, and the education field has inevitably experienced secondary differentiation. While urban kindergartens are becoming increasingly luxurious and urban preschool children enjoy high-quality over-education, rural preschool education is relatively backward and the conditions are simple. However, with the transformation of economic system, the preschool children of most migrant workers who participate in urbanization have not received due attention. Modern education should belong to ordinary people and every child, not to a few people or city people. Preschool education for the children of migrant workers in a weak position can not be ignored, which is not only related to educational equity, but also related to the foundation of basic education. In this context, a group of teachers and students from Beijing Normal University walked out of the study room, faced this social reality squarely, inherited the spirit of civilian education of their predecessors, devoted themselves to the social practice of change with their own actions, mobilized non-governmental forces to set up game groups in the Sihuan market where migrant workers lived, and explored ways to solve the education problems of migrant workers' children in the form of informal education.
In the past 30 years of reform and opening up, although preschool education has developed by leaps and bounds with the economic and social development, the city-centered policy orientation has made our preschool education more and more limited to standardized single standards, and even inclined to be privileged, divorced from reality and deviated from the direction of popularization, which shows that our preschool education is still facing the problem of "where to go". College students in the Fourth Ring Road do the opposite. They have taken a solid step on the road of private education, and promoted education reform with their own efforts, so that preschool education can return to fairness and balance.