In the field of education, there are various definitions of "education", which can be said that different people have different opinions. Generally speaking, people define "education" from two different angles, one is the social angle and the other is the individual angle. The former Soviet Union and China generally define "education" from a social perspective, while educators in Britain and the United States generally define "education" from an individual perspective. To define "education" from a social perspective, we can divide the definition of "education" into different levels:
(1) In a broad sense, any activity that improves people's knowledge and skills and affects people's ideology and morality is education. "Education" is regarded as a subsystem in the whole social system, which distributes and undertakes certain social functions.
The most essential understanding of education is the knowledge instillation and behavior guidance of people's thoughts by society; First, the object of education is people; Second, the content must be benign and meaningful. So that people can transform society.
(2) Narrow sense: refers to the sublimation of individual spirit. This definition emphasizes the influence of social factors on individual development. Defining "education" from a personal point of view is often equivalent to an individual's learning or development process.
(3) In a narrow sense, it mainly refers to school education, which refers to the activities that educators have a purposeful, planned and organized influence on the educated according to the requirements of a certain society or class, and cultivate them into people needed by a certain society or class. This mainly refers to the exam-oriented education in China campus.
Education is a practical activity to promote individual socialization and social individualization under a certain social background.
If defined around the basic elements of educational activities, education can be defined as a social activity in which people consciously transmit information to others through various methods and media, hoping to influence their spiritual world or psychological state and help or hinder others from acquiring certain concepts, qualities and abilities. People in the former role are called educators, while people in the latter role are called educational objects. This definition accords with all human educational activities and can be used as the basic definition of education.
Zhang Xiulin, a contemporary poet and cultural scholar, has the following explanation in the article On Education:
The so-called education should be the teaching and dissemination of social culture. Social culture, including art and science, should include three levels of content. The first level refers to high-level culture, which is abstract and intangible, such as social psychology, aesthetics and values. The second level refers to things or things' culture. From the first level, it is concrete. Although there is no concrete existence, we can really feel its structure and activities, such as political power and its institutions. The third level refers to the surface culture, which is both visible and tangible. Simply speaking, it is spiritual culture, spiritual materialized culture and material culture. The purpose of education is to educate people, in fact, it is to let people accept all kinds of useful knowledge, so as to absorb and melt this knowledge and make it directly act on society, or to sublimate new knowledge on the basis of this knowledge, that is, to discover and invent. The former is like a physical change, and the person who accepts it is like a container for things. A few things are still the same, but in a different place, some miscellaneous things are probably what we often call practical talents-skilled or skilled talents; The latter is similar to a chemical reaction, which produces different and other things. Such talents can master the first-class culture well and easily form their own unique ideas, concepts and research methods. This is the creative talent. The cultural influence of a country and a nation in the world is mainly the influence of first-class culture and creative talents. The highly developed nervous system of human beings is the material basis and prerequisite for the emergence and development of education. It provides complete thinking functions such as feeling, memory, association, imagination and reasoning, which makes people's consciousness influence and spread each other.