Abstract: Disciplinary key competences are high-order abilities and humanistic abilities in disciplines, with disciplinary understanding or thinking as their core. They are the basic goals of subject education in information era. They essentially embody the fundamental change of disciplinary epistemology:from fact-basedness to understanding-orientation. The first meaning of subject education in information era is to choose few and important disciplinary core ideas, construct dynamic relationships among them, change curriculum structure from the type of "coverage of disciplinary facts" to the one of "understanding disciplinary ideas", and root all the disciplinary core ideas into real problematic situations so that students can continuously investigate the ideas and deepen their disciplinary understanding progressively across their ages or grades. The second meaning of subject education in information era is to help students learn disciplines through disciplinary practices, and experience the birth of disciplinary knowledge, so that they can understand the nature of disciplines and develop the practical abilities of disciplines. The important feature of the new subject education is the dual-directions of disciplinary world and life world, disciplinary practice and life practice. The urgent task for the reform of Chinese subject education is to give up "the view of indirect experience" and "the view of basic knowledge and skills", and introduce "the vision of direct experience" and "the vision of key competences".

Key words: disciplinary key competences, disciplinary core ideas