The Logical Ecology of the “Five Educations” in China’s Ethnic Preparatory Education from the Perspective of Singapore’s Pre-University Education

Abstract

China’s ethnic preparatory education bears the important mission of consolidating the academic foundation of ethnic minority students and forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation. At the current stage, the practice of talent cultivation faces the difficult problem of structural imbalance among the “five educations,” the core manifestation of which is the excessive competition of intellectual education, which continuously squeezes the development space of moral education, physical education, aesthetic education, and labor and technical education, resulting in prominent structural tensions within the education system and insufficient synergy in cultivating students. This paper takes Singapore’s pre-university education as a reference perspective, introduces the theory of logical ecology, regards the five educations (moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, and labor) as interrelated yet independent structural entities, and analyzes the internal mechanisms of their mutual exclusion. Drawing on the mature paradigms of values-based moral education, practice-oriented labor education, and contextualized aesthetic education in Singapore’s pre-university education, it explores a reconstruction path for the five educations to move from competition to symbiosis. The study proposes building a complementary and symbiotic education system based on mutual empowerment between moral and intellectual education, the integration of labor and intellectual education through practice, the synergy between physical and intellectual education within and beyond the curriculum, and the infiltration of aesthetic and intellectual education across disciplines, so as to optimize the logical ecology of ethnic preparatory education and promote its high-quality development.