Interpretation Of "Education As Life

Education as life" is a educational proposition of historic and realistic significance. Combined with Dewey's educational theory and the historical background of the time, this paper interprets the proposition at first. The proposition contains three orders of meanings at least. First, it means education must concern individual everyday life. Second, it means education must involve individual non-everyday life. And at the last, it means education must construct individual possible life .Dewey thought that these meanings and the functions they embodied were harmonic and uniform.Based on the above interpretation, the paper reflects on Dewey's proposition through the angle of the Reproduction Theory. The reproduction models of economy and culture and hegemony-country analysed the process and functions of schooling according to economic and cultural and political system. They disclosed that schooling could not provide an progressive and reconstructive life for individual, and could not become the basic organization to promote democratic life, for non-everyday life penetrated into schooling and controled it's everyday life .As a result, the central function of schooling is reproduction. "Education as life" not only indicates the advancement of Dewey's educational theory , but also shows his historical limitation .After having revealed the limitation of the proposition, the paper expatiates on the proposition's realistic significance to the curriculum and instruction reform of ourcountry's primary education-to urge the transformation of the curriculum andinstruction theory. At the respect of curriculum reform, we can acquire two elicitations from the proposition that is integrating curriculum object and content. And at the respect of instruction reform, it inspires us to understand instruction process and teacher-student relation again.