China’s Educational Studies in the Years of Reform and Opening-Up
摘要
There are different boundaries and definitions in terms of pedagogy and education discipline in different academic literature and management documents. Pedagogy is defined as “the science of educational phenomena and their general laws” in the Dictionary of Education (Gu 1986). In Western countries, “pedagogy” is from the Greek pedagogue (teacher), which means the caring of children. Since the Magna Didactica written by the Czech educator Comenius in 1632, pedagogy has developed into a discipline, and the publication of Herbart’s Allgemeine Padagogik in 1806 is the symbol of the formation of an independent discipline. Since the twentieth century, thanks to the emergence of subdisciplines of pedagogy and the formation of the educational science system, the concept of “pedagogy” has different meanings on different occasions as follows: first, the same meaning as “educational science”; second, the sum of all subdisciplines of pedagogy; third, disciplines that study the general laws of educational phenomena, including general pedagogy; and fourth, public educational courses in normal colleges and universities (Shu 1999). Instead of trying to make a clear and strict definition, we adopt the relatively open problem-oriented concept of “education studies.” Sometimes concepts such as “pedagogy” and “educational science” are borrowed to refer to such academic activities as academic research, conferences, lectures, and personnel training.