At 1:30p.m. on Feb. 24, the second lecture of a course Research on Frontiers of Pedagogy of Department of Education was given at Room 913, Liberal Arts Building, Zhongbei Campus. The course was designed to invite some related scholars in the field pedagogy to share their latest research results in the form of lectures and reports.
Prof. Chen Guisheng was the guest speaker. Besides him, under the leadership of Huang Zhongjing, Chair of Department of Education, the lecture was attended by more than one hundred and twenty students and teachers of Department of Education and by sixteen students who took pre-courses of 2017 “Fonian” Program in Faculty of Education.
From the topic of “What is education?”, Prof. Chen thought, when it comes to discipline development routes that usually began from “what is it” to “how to do it”, compared to other disciplines , the discipline of pedagogy answered question “how” first: it was on the way to practice. As for “what is education”, there was no enough knowledge. To better understand it, back to ancient concepts of “teaching” and “educating” in different times and cultural backgrounds, Prof. Chen pointed out that the original meaning of education was to make people good, which was added new connotations in the present society.
With the development of society, the original meaning of education has derivative meanings, such as the second meaning “independent and perfect personality” and the third meaning “social independence and perfect personality" and so on. With the development of individual socialization, manifesting character has also been a proper meaning included in connotations of education. For this situation, Prof. Chen explained a few small stories cited from the "Analects of Confucius" in order to deepen the understanding of changes of the original meaning of education.
It is the foundation and of great meaning to understand and explain “what is education” when studying problems of education. From the original meaning of education, Prof. Chen studied its changes under the development of culture and society, presenting us a historical track of the development of connotations of education. As a result, we could have a more profound understanding of the issue.
