The Necessity of Implementing General Education in China University
(A) the current education situation in China
(1) China's education is seriously utilitarian, and humanistic quality education and moral education are "cold".
University education is too utilitarian, especially under the condition of market economy, the goal of university education has been adjusted to the direction of market demand. For example, in recent years, there has been a "research fever" in universities. Some college students attend English training classes to prepare for TOEFL IELTS; Some prepare for the CPA exam, judicial exam, or civil service exam; Everyone else is busy with the computer grade exam. However, those disciplines that focus on cultivating college students' rational thinking and humanistic quality have been neglected. What's more, the management of some colleges and universities also think it useless to learn those things. As long as students master professional skills and have corresponding certificates with high gold content, they can find their own satisfactory jobs and have no worries. Therefore, university education is even dubbed "textual research education".
(2) The university curriculum is unreasonable.
Universities in China place too much emphasis on professional education, lack of basic literacy education and neglect general education. For example, a common phenomenon in colleges and universities now is the excessive uneven distribution of arts and sciences resources, and the serious imbalance between humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. For science and engineering, humanities and social science education is a weak link. Students' cultural accomplishment is not enough and their humanistic quality is not high. For the cultivation of liberal arts students, the cultivation of natural science is also very weak. Some liberal arts colleges only focus on cultivating students' liberal arts thinking and ability, ignoring the cultivation of students' scientific quality and accomplishment; There are also some colleges and universities that only pay attention to scientific thinking and ignore humanistic quality education.
(B) the necessity of general education for college students
Yang Shuzi, a famous scholar in China, once pointed out: "If we lose people in education and forget that people have thoughts, feelings, personality and spiritual world, we will lose everything."
(1) The implementation of general education is to meet the demand of economic globalization for comprehensive talents.
With the continuous development of science and technology, information technology, globalization and internationalization, and the rapid progress of society, pure professionals can no longer meet their development needs. In addition, the great progress of modern science needs more and more mutual reference and support from many disciplines, and modern science presents a comprehensive trend. Even if you are engaged in research in specialized fields, you need extensive knowledge as the backing, because a problem may need multidisciplinary knowledge to solve. Therefore, the implementation of general education is not only to expand students' knowledge and broaden their horizons, but more importantly, to comprehensively cultivate students' abilities in all aspects to meet the increasing demand of society for talents.
(2) General education is the need of college students' personal development.
Compared with professional education, general education has many advantages. General education can help students learn to think independently, learn to study independently and learn to distinguish right from wrong. Make students smarter and more alert to all kinds of difficulties that may be encountered in life; Let students master the correct way of thinking in the process of exploring knowledge. In order to achieve long-term development, college students must master a solid knowledge base and dabble in various disciplines. Summers, president of Harvard University, pointed out in his speech entitled "What are the Characteristics of First-class Universities" in Peking University on May 14, 2002: "Let me make a general evaluation of knowledge, that is, you can't tell where the most useful knowledge comes from at all, and you can't predict where it comes from; You can't design some programs to find out what is the most useful form of knowledge. ..... Just because we can't predict what kind of knowledge will make great contributions to our society, we can confidently predict that new knowledge, new ideas, new methods and clever ideas will be very important to our future. " This shows the great significance of general education.
(3) The implementation of general education is an inevitable requirement of China's current educational situation.
There are many problems in China's current education system, which makes it urgent for university education to change from focusing on professional education to general education. In social practice, we see that many people trained by universities have a weak sense of justice and responsibility, a confused concept of right and wrong and a low moral quality; Many of them have weak practical ability, do not know how to integrate theory with practice, and lack innovative spirit. Universities should gradually lose their due role. Therefore, China's higher education system is bound to usher in a profound change.