An exam site at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, Hubei Province, on Dec. 20, 2025, the first day of China’s 2026 National Postgraduate Entrance Examination Photo: IC PHOTO

In the social sciences, the concept of “boundary” emphasizes the distinctiveness and relativity of each domain, organization, or system, and embodies the unity of “name” and “substance.” As a subsystem of the broader social system, education possesses boundaries of its own, yet it confronts a complex reality at these boundaries. The considerable spillover value of education has drawn the attention of nearly all other social systems, many of which seek to shape educational rules through their own value narratives in pursuit of specific interests. This has led to growing external encroachment on educational boundaries. At the same time, technological progress and the evolution of knowledge have intensified structural imbalances within education itself, challenging its essential attributes and giving rise to a crisis of boundaries.

Whether intentional or disorderly, the erosion of educational boundaries inevitably weakens the realization of educational value and damages education’s essential nature. For this reason, a reexamination of educational boundaries is imperative. Reassessing, redefining, and clarifying these boundaries is a prerequisite for society to properly understand, preserve, and enable education to fulfill its functions.

Erosion of educational boundaries by external forces

As part of the social system, education is not itself a system of material resource production, but rather one of resource consumption. This structural feature accounts for its high dependence on society at large and renders external intervention inevitable. At the same time, the irreplaceable contributions education makes to society stimulate impulses among external systems to intervene in and exert control over it. The external environment shaping educational boundaries consists primarily of two dimensions: society and the state. Social forces and state power sometimes challenge the value standards and ontological attributes of the educational field. The collapse of boundaries, in turn,exacerbates internal disorder and functional misalignment within the educational system.

The logic of social division of labor requires recognition that each domain operates according to its own rules, and that social subsystems must respect one another’s value norms rather than arbitrarily crossing functional boundaries. When rules and value claims valid in one domain are imposed on another, functional disorder becomes inevitable. Society needs education, just as education depends on society, but this mutual dependence does not imply the absence of boundaries. In practice, administrative departments outside the education system, enterprises, public institutions, and even civil organizations often extend their influence through non-educational affairs, leading to the passive erosion of educational boundaries and the distortion of educational functions.

Within discussions of the education–society relationship, American philosopher John Dewey’s assertion that “the school is society” and Chinese educationist Tao Xingzhi’s proposition that “society is the school” were once widely acclaimed, yet later subject to misinterpretation. These misreadings have encouraged boundary transgressions, gradually turning education into a field expected to resolve an ever-expanding range of social problems. As a result, responsibilities that properly belong to society have been systematically shifted onto schools—a structural source of the generalized expansion of educational burdens.

The state exercises power through government, with educational administrative departments managing education on its behalf. At present, performancism has emerged as a key logic of educational governance. In a context of intense societal attention to education, the pursuit of “success” and avoidance of “failure” have reinforced external intervention in educational processes. Education is a slow and delicate process governed by its own internal logic. State power should safeguard education’s internal principles from external damage.

Changes of internal elements, shifting of educational boundaries

According to systems theory, changes in a system’s internal elements inevitably alter the system itself, thereby inducing shifts in its boundaries. Within education, technological advancement and the evolution of knowledge constitute primary variables driving such change. Their effects include the imbalance and weakening of educational boundaries and, ultimately, a crisis in foundational educational theory. This crisis manifests in the loss of professional identity caused by blurred teacher role boundaries, the generalization of instructional content resulting from the topologization of knowledge boundaries, and value disorientation produced by the rapid, unrestrained advance of science and technology.

The teaching profession’s inherent complexity makes the management of role boundaries particularly challenging. When these boundaries are repeatedly penetrated, individuals are often driven to play safe amid anxiety and burnout, expending their energies simply to cope with increasing demands. Over time, professional identity and well-being erode, and psychological strain proliferates.

Digital hypercommunication further extends the physical and temporal boundaries of teachers’ roles. Instant messaging tools such as WeChat and QQ push teaching into virtual space, while the “disembodiment” of education deprives teachers of a sense of co-presence amid excessive communication. Smartphones have become mobile sites of educational labor, rendering teachers’ lifeworlds increasingly transparent and blurring the boundary between work and life. Many teachers thus find themselves locked into a condition of “perpetual online labor,” intensifying role conflict, identity slippage, and emotional exhaustion.

At the social and psychological level, digitalization also disrupts teachers’ professional self-recognition in the real world. Educational models driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and “Internet Plus” have gradually weakened teachers’ epistemic authority, as students often surpass them in the mastery and application of information technologies. In the process, teacher authority is deconstructed, and teachers’ social roles and collective images are blurred. They are no longer perceived as living, embodied cultural figures growing symbiotically with schools, but instead become atomized, coded, stereotyped, and othered in cyberspace.

Education cultivates individuals through the transmission of knowledge and the development of competencies. In traditional settings, knowledge dissemination relied on material carriers such as books, teachers, libraries, and schools, and depended heavily on expert authority for selection and filtration. Digital technologies have radically expanded channels of knowledge transmission while weakening the boundary between experts and the general public. Cyberspace is saturated with vast quantities of unfiltered, fragmented information and one-dimensional conclusions, disrupting the traditional linkage between education and knowledge literacy. The conflation of the virtual and the factual, as well as of phenomena and essence, has breached educational boundaries. Yet education should, using the minimum necessary knowledge carriers, cultivate philosophical thinking, cognitive habits, scientific methods, and ethical virtues, adhering to the principle that “teaching a man to fish is better than giving a man a fish.” The selection and transmission of knowledge must not compromise education’s essential attributes.

Recent breakthroughs in large language models, along with the application of big data and AI in education, mark a critical turning point. Education, however, is fundamentally concerned with shaping the human soul and modes of existence, whereas the algorithmic worlds constructed by AI exhibit strong tendencies toward objectification and de-essentialization. Deep technological intervention at educational boundaries risks obscuring understandings of human essence and encourages reductive, instrumental interpretations of the human being, leading to an ontological displacement of educational boundaries. The genuine power of technology lies not in substitution, but in complementarity. Education’s humanistic structure requires technology to provide intelligible, interpretable, and personalized support that advances learner-centered education. In this sense, the ultimate rule of technology in education is to counter technological rationality through ethical construction.

Returning to the logical origin of educational boundaries

The foregoing analysis suggests that the “unbearable weight” often imposed on educational systems stems from sustained external pressure, internal structural change, and repeated boundary transgressions.

Education is indeed an open social system, but openness does not imply uncritical acceptance of all external value demands. As a relatively independent system, education depends on its own distinctive logical structure and normative mechanisms. When meaning is constructed around education in different contexts, it is necessary to clarify and respect its boundaries—that is, the rules governing the educational field and the scope of their applicability. Education is an activity oriented toward human cultivation, and its emergence, operation, and development follow unique internal logical structures and “rules of the game.” Hegel’s assertion that everything possesses a defining “quality,” which constitutes its boundary, is instructive here. The “quality” of education determines its inherent normativity. This normativity does not reject openness; rather, it insists on preserving internal coherence and value bottom lines within openness. Responses to external demands must therefore proceed on the premise of maintaining education’s qualitative determinacy, without eroding its intrinsic attributes or diminishing its fundamental benefits. Such boundary consciousness is both the condition for preserving education’s essence and the basis for its coordinated interaction with other social systems.

When internal educational elements develop to a point that established value systems and logical classifications require reorganization, this process must not undermine education’s essential attributes or violate the determinacy of its quality. In an era of rapid technological penetration and continuous institutional restructuring, education should neither isolate itself nor cling rigidly to tradition. Yet regardless of how reorganization proceeds, education must remain firmly human-centered. Humans are conscious beings, and freedom is the most basic condition underlying all possibilities of education and its transformative power. Human subjectivity is the concrete expression of this freedom; it grounds both the legitimacy of education’s existence and the ultimate criteria for defining its boundaries. Technology should not become a disciplinary mechanism constraining human freedom, but rather a supportive means of enabling human self-realization.

Ultimately, the delineation of educational boundaries must rest on the principle that human beings are ends in themselves, with the realization of freedom as its value horizon. All expectations and impulses directed toward educational boundaries should treat human beings as explorers in search of meaning, ensuring that the fundamental premise—that human freedom is both the starting point and the end point of education—is consistently upheld.

Sun Hua (professor) and Xu Sinan are from the School of Education at Xi’an International Studies University. This article has been edited and excerpted from Education Research Monthly, Issue 8, 2025.