"Let Children Be The Center Of Education"

In 90's of 19th century, the position of "children" was rising dramatically in American school education. The new findings of education philosophy, education psychology and the newborn education sociology all supported that children should play a more important role in school education. In such a circumstance, Dewey, J. raised the slogan that children should be the center of appliances of education; people even regarded the following century as" the century of children".14 years after the beginning of " the century of children", a Chinese educator named Yu Ziyi went to Teachers' College of Columbia University, the center of American progressive education, for a visit, There, Yu Ziyi was deeply absorbed by the slogan raised by Dewey. After his return from USA, he advocated curriculum experiments in Chinese primary schools one after another. The first one was "Correlated Program" (1914-1918), and the second "project-method experiment" (1919-1924),Step by step, Yu Ziyi explored a new way to incarnate the slogan into practice with his comrades and got his own understanding in the end. As a part of progressive education movement, Yu Ziyi's curriculum experiments contributed a lot to the whole world.It seems that history likes to repeat itself. It is nearly one century after Yu Ziyi's first try that we meet the same slogan again. But we should remind ourselves that to turn a slogan into reality is more or less at risk, since slogans are always exciting but ambiguous. If the educators cannot make clear what the slogan was aiming at, misunderstanding is almost unavoidable. For the same reason, Yu Ziyi's curriculum experiments experienced a lot of frustrations during the process. It would be quite wise of us to learn something from the history, and then continue the efforts to make children the center of education appliances.