Abstract: As a representative of scientific education，generaleducation of science contributes to the improvement of the scientific literacy of people. The general courses，Developments of Optics and Human Civilization，focus on the history of opticsas the main body of the course and sets three levels of progressive teaching contents in practice. They correspond to the basic and remedial，the advanced and integrated，the extensive and diversifiedteaching contents. First，this curriculum designconstructs the system of basic opticalknowledge. Then it guides students to analyze the development regularity and the scientific thinking in the scientific research. Moreover，it realizes the dialogue between optics and human history as well as society throughthe multidisciplinary，cross-cultural perspective. It is the goal of the course construction to achieve the popularization for the wholesubject of optics to students.

Key words: general education, general course of optics, history of optics, scientific thinking