Character Interview Original Article Review Series No. 93: Du Yue Du Yue: No Model to Follow There are advantages and disadvantages to examine

[Note: Du Yue, born in 1956, was the Secretary-General of the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO.] This article was first published in June 1, 2001 in Chinese Talents, by Qi Shengli. The picture is the author's photo】

<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > Duyue: There are no patterns to follow</h1>

Wen Qi victory

"The 21st century is a century of educational change, and its outstanding feature is lifelong education." This is the information that the reporter got from Du Yue, director of the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO.

There are many references to lifelong education, such as continuing education, regular education and so on. At present, the international common English name is "Life-long Learning", that is, lifelong learning. This was clearly proposed by UNESCO and other international institutions at the World Conference on Education for All held in Thailand in March 1990, and it was after this conference that lifelong education began to receive wider attention and was put on the agenda of countries around the world.

To meet the various learning needs of all learners as the main content, lifelong education enables everyone from birth to retirement or even after retirement, can take the initiative to receive education at any time, and socialize education to form a real educational society.

Throughout the world, developed countries such as britain, the United States, France, Germany, Japan and Northern Europe have established a large-scale lifelong education system with their strong economic strength and a large proportion of education investment - in addition to the formal education system, various training centers and more educational institutions now called "learning centers" provide learning opportunities for practitioners and non-practitioners, and play an undoubted role in the development of human resources and the improvement of personal ability. Learners are active participants, and trainers at the Learning Center develop instructional plans based on the learners' needs. The learning center is open, the learning form is flexible, as long as you have a certain learning foundation, you can come to the center to learn or receive training, sometimes 3 to 5 days, or even 1 or 2 hours. It can be said that lifelong education provides more opportunities for everyone's self-improvement, career choice and national selection of talents. But this is not to say that lifelong education is the pankey of human self-development. Due to social system reasons, especially the widening gap between rich and poor within developed countries, including the United States, and their unique values, there are still a large number of people who do not receive the learning opportunities they expect.

On the other hand, many developing countries, especially those with large populations, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh, are still at the level of eradicating illiteracy and achieving universal access to basic education. In these countries, the development of lifelong education will take time and great efforts owing to poverty, rural segregation, discrimination against women and lack of educational opportunities for ethnic minorities.

However, some of the middle-class developed countries and developing countries with capitalist systems, whether in terms of universal basic education or in the basic eradication of illiteracy, have achieved far less than those of countries with socialist systems, such as North Korea, Cuba, Viet Nam and so on. This phenomenon is worth pondering.

In contrast, China's educational development achievements are the most prominent. In the past 10 years, China has taken the "Pujiu" as the starting point and made great efforts to do a good job in the "two basics" work, so that the popularization of basic education in China is almost the same in the case that education funds and developed countries are not comparable. Today, China can proudly declare that it has "largely eradicated illiteracy." Of course, the stable social environment and the continuous development of the economy also provide a guarantee for China to begin to propose and build a "lifelong education system".

There is no model for building a lifelong education system in the world. But one thing is almost certain: there is an interaction between the degree of development of the country and the talent structure, and the situation is almost non-existent when the country is very developed, the talent structure is very backward, or the opposite is the opposite.

As the world's most populous country, China has the most human resources. It is conceivable that if each of us strives to learn and continuously improve, and to do the best job in our respective posts, then our country will make leaps and bounds in production, management and social order. Because the quality of people has improved, we can create value in the most scientific, most reasonable and most economical way, thereby reducing the waste of resources and time, we will not have so many fake and shoddy products and tofu residue projects; if our managers are able to improve efficiency through continuous learning and updating concepts, they will be able to do more productive work for the people and society. In this way, our society will be better organized, and we will no longer have to spend so much money on environmental governance and social security, so we can turn the saved funds to education (and national defense), forming a virtuous circle of "teaching for education".