Locke 's Thought Of Liberal Education And Its Influence On Family Education In China

John Locke is the British philosopher and ideologist and educator in the seventeenth century, as the founder of the modern liberalism. The liberal education thought that he came up with not only affect those relatively open-minded parents in the very long period of time, but also have a huge and far-reaching influence on Britain and other Europeans and Americans.Locke attached great importance to the role of education. He held that mankind was different for education and came up with the famous “White board”. He thought that education aims at cultivating a new type of gentleman with four basic characteristics “virtue, wisdom,etiquette, learning”. The new type of gentleman is free citizen that political society needs and is a reasonable and free citizen with sense of independence and good virtue.Locke also put forward that the process of the implementation of liberal education should follow the three principles:principle of complying with principle, principle of conforming to nature, functional principle.The rich connotation of Locke’s liberal education is mainly made up of health education with “parent toil” for the standard, moral education based on “rationality” knowledge education for development of “understanding”. As for the choice of education places, Locke listed many of the problems of school education. In his opinion, only family can provide children a good education environment, and child education in the family needs an important auxiliary, the tutor who is a sophisticated mentor with good upbringing, large business experience.Locke’s liberal education influences penetrated into every aspect of British modern education practice. Inspection to Locke’s liberal education brought some beneficial implications to our today’s family education.