This topic is not suitable for making a speech. Sociologist Mills believes that people with a low starting point will think about this common problem. Moreover, everyone knows some general problems; What everyone knows is hard to say. Just as people ask painters what is the best and what is the most difficult to draw, painters will say: it is easy to draw ghosts, but difficult to draw people. It's easy to draw ghosts, because no one has really seen them, so it doesn't matter if you doodle. As for people, everyone has seen too much and can't scribble. It's a bit difficult to talk about this topic now, just like a painter painting people.

It's hard to talk about it, and finally it's hard to talk about it, because now everyone thinks that liberal arts is sick, and we can't help but care.

Outsiders probably have four kinds of impressions of liberal arts: first, liberal arts is a philosophy of literature and history, plus a lot of social sciences such as politics, sociology, education, economics, law, linguistics, communication and so on. Second, liberal arts is a lot of literature and history knowledge, concepts and theories to be memorized. Third, liberal arts will inevitably give birth to many worries, or cultivate nervousness and common sense, or create words and play word games. Sorrow is like Feng Yansi. Obviously, spring has come like a beautifully dressed little girl. Everyone can simply be a "pig with beautiful spring scenery" and greet him happily, but Feng sighed gently: "Don't throw away your leisure for a long time. Every spring comes, and the sadness remains the same. I often get sick before spending every day, but I don't care if I look thin in the mirror. Willow on the green lake embankment, want to ask new worries, what happens every year? The independent small bridge is full of sleeves, and Lin Ping Crescent returns. " This kind of writing is very beautiful and profound; However, if a person always sighs around you like this in daily life, how can you stand it? Eloquence is Yu, while Zhaoming Wenxuan chooses his Ode to Lottie's Passion and Ask the King of Chu. These two things have turned things around. They are beautiful, but they are also annoying to cut. There are also some literati who play with words and think that virtue, speech and meritorious service are the three immortals. But Lide is very hard, and it takes courage and opportunity to make contributions. Moreover, if things are good for a while, it is better to fiddle with words. Text is entertaining and pleasing to the eye, but people really think its use is suspicious. Fourth, these add up to a bad image of liberal arts: liberal arts are useless! If you have to study, you need a good memory.

Many people in the circle also feel bad. Many accomplished liberal arts scholars are reluctant to let their children study liberal arts again, as if they had suffered two losses. Some scholars enjoyed the scenery outside and went home. The children told him that I don't want to be like you in the future. What kind of blow do you think this is? Some excellent liberal arts scholars are willing to die for their own ideals or preferences, but it is really difficult to keep up with the details of life and polish their spirit bit by bit.

Kevin is really sick.

I'm not going to talk about the nature and reasons of these problems. It's a little complicated. It is certainly more difficult to solve such a problem. I just want to say one question here first: What should liberal arts be like without getting sick? In other words, I want to talk about what I think a good liberal arts can teach and what people who like liberal arts can learn from it.

There are good and bad liberal arts education.

Liberal arts are really useless sometimes. What happened? Without the need to treat others! I sometimes like to go to a sparsely populated place and stare blankly at the green mountains and white clouds. Being in a daze is extremely pleasant: you don't have to deal with people, so you don't worry; I don't have to deal with things to survive, so I'm not busy. I think it would be great if a person could stay in a daze all the time! To do this, many things are redundant, and the whole society is redundant. As for liberal arts, it is definitely redundant and really useless.

But that's impossible. Whether you like it or not, we all deal with people directly or indirectly in different forms in society and in various social relations. In other words, you must deal with people. More importantly, in a society, we need to have a general consensus on how to treat others well. With it, we can get along, have a minimum expectation for each other and communicate normally. Otherwise, you cannot do most things peacefully. For example, when four people play poker, they just said that A is bigger than K. In the second circle, one person insisted that A is the smallest, and every circle is arguing about such a thing. How to play this card? When you go shopping, if you are not sure that you have given the money to the other party every time, people will let you pay again. How do you pay for food? When you take a bus, if the driver only opens one door every time he arrives at the station, opening the front door, middle door and back door depends on his pleasure and random decision, how can you take this bus? The culture we often talk about is actually a relatively fixed way to treat people in a society that everyone can share. However, the cultural methods of each society are not the same. Habitual methods may have some advantages and disadvantages, which need to be constantly distinguished and improved. What we mean by liberal arts is basically to explore and study the good rules and methods of dealing with people and to spread these good methods as much as possible. In his later years, Mr. Ba Jin asked himself: What are the functions and research purposes of literature and art? "Do we just write on paper to express ourselves?" He agreed: "It is generally acknowledged that the purpose of literature is to make people better." In fact, this should also be the purpose of the whole liberal arts.

There will be differences on what is "good" and what is "better", but I still want to emphasize that my so-called good liberal arts must first conform to this direction: making people better. Otherwise, it is a bad liberal arts. This is the first thing a good liberal arts teacher should know.

A good liberal arts should not teach people to be alienated from society.

Good liberal arts can also be used for induction training, so that people can learn knowledge, skills and theories, better analyze social environmental conditions, develop competitiveness and cope with social living environment. In a word, a good liberal arts should teach people to integrate into the normal society normally, rather than alienate or even escape from the normal society pathologically. Perhaps it can be said that the second knowledge of a good liberal arts is: don't just read dead books, but also teach people to capture social needs and market needs.

There are always people who say that the market society is unfavorable and unfair to liberal arts. In fact, the society with market economy as its economic pillar has also given liberal arts some fair opportunities. Therefore, those who teach liberal arts and study liberal arts may not be able to integrate into society well and normally. It is said that half of the real estate owners in Hang Cheng are history departments. The background of literature and history did not prevent them from cunningly capturing market trends. On the contrary, it was convenient for them to learn from the process of developed countries, regions and cities at home and abroad, and think that China should go through the boom period of real estate industry and make money first. Ma Yun, who has appeared frequently recently, bought Yahoo China, which is a great event in the IT field in China. Born in England, he is a typical layman. As far as I know, he has no skills, looks and martial arts. He has courage, a sense of innovation (or a sense of seizing opportunities), a little toughness and a little emotional intelligence. I'm afraid his liberal arts education and interest have taught him or inspired him.

Therefore, many liberal arts teachers are alienated from the society and immersed in the sense of being abused by the alienated society, which is very bad. Of course, a good liberal arts will not teach people to earn everything. That's bad liberal arts education and bad behavior of liberal arts learners. For example, bel canto students are sad agents who dare to make any money, which probably belongs to this category.

A good liberal arts should teach people wisdom.

When it comes to making money, Tai Shigong has long lamented that everyone in the world comes for the benefit. However, everything in the world is worth seeing and doing like that. I often repeat the story told by Pasternak in Doctor Zhivage: God originally assigned life span to four kinds of animals: man, horse, dog and monkey. People sleep late and are late. God gave them the remaining 25 years. People are greedy, so they ask for more. God has to ask people to consult with other animals themselves. People begged the horse first, and the horse was also very kind, and spared his life for 25 years. People will discuss with dogs and monkeys again, and dogs and monkeys will each give people 25 years. People finally have a life span of one hundred years. From then on, people lived a human life for the first 25 years, the second 25 years worked like horses, the third 25 years barked like dogs, and the fourth 25 years were teased like monkeys.

Isn't that how many people live? To avoid it, you certainly need wisdom to figure out what to do and what not to do. And a good liberal arts should cultivate people's wisdom. Perhaps it can be said that the third knowledge of a good liberal arts is: don't just learn to make money, but also learn to do something. Only by making good use of the wisdom of liberal arts can we choose good goals and criteria and not be a technical idiot; It is possible to resist the customs and bad customs around you, at least not to be deceived by it; You can also better dispel your own problems, know what is understandable, what is not necessarily worth your joining in the fun, what can join in the fun but not necessarily true, and even laugh at yourself and do it happily, such as being a "fan" or something.

Good liberal arts should cultivate aesthetic feeling and poetry.

A good liberal arts should teach people to immerse themselves in advanced culture, cultivate an elegant state of mind and strive to pursue a poetic aesthetic life. I said this is the fourth knowledge of a good liberal arts: don't just read professional books, but also learn everything to improve your taste.

According to boswell's Biography of Johnson, Johnson, who independently completed the English Dictionary, claimed that his Latin was beaten to pieces by his teacher Mr. Hunter, and praised the teaching of corporal punishment: "I would rather the students are afraid of the pointer and force them to study than tell them all day. If you do this, you will have a better future than your brother and sister. The whip itself has the power to decide; The children were afraid of being beaten, so they had to study hard and the problem was solved. If we encourage them to be competitive, they will be different from each other and have a sense of superiority, which will certainly cause endless harm; And make brothers and sisters hate each other. " Corporal punishment itself does not conform to modern education. But he hit the nail on the head by opposing encouraging children to get ahead blindly, competing with their compatriots and being hostile to others. If the heart of competition cannot be properly adjusted, there will inevitably be unimaginable infighting. Liu Xiang's "New Order Miscellaneous Matters" recorded a story: Chu people were jealous of Liang people's melons and secretly scratched Liang people's melons at night, making them "dead". The thought and behavior of this Chu people are both insidious and typical. If everyone has this kind of "Chu people" mind now, and everyone can't prevent others, this society will be in big trouble. In Xunzi's words, people are born with desires and cannot compete; However, struggle is chaos, chaos is poverty, and poverty can't win anything. The solution, first, what Xunzi said, is to make the boundaries of measurement in all aspects of behavior and distribution, so that everyone can live in peace. Therefore, he said, "the owners will train them." There is a more modern way, which is to encourage children to cultivate interest, beauty and poetry, and to study with the attitude of pursuing interest, beauty and poetic satisfaction, instead of just thinking about getting ahead. This is one of the basic contents that a good liberal arts student should strive to educate his children. Locke's so-called British liberal education, the purpose of which is to train people rather than workers, has almost no meaning.

Poetry can sometimes make people feel comfortable, and even make people turn bitterness into beauty. Notes on Selected Poems of the Song Dynasty records Su Shunqin's "Leisure in Summer": "Guo Jia is drunk, and books on his pillow are messy. The cool breeze in Beixuan blows open the sparse bamboo and lies down to see the blue sky and white clouds. " Isn't it cool to read this poem and experience this artistic conception in hot summer? Another: the epigraph is "more leaky", the tone begins with the more leaky words in the text, and the next clue is "buttonwood, three nights of rain." If you don't leave your feelings, you will suffer. A leaf, a voice, and empty footsteps fall into a bright place. " Sleepless troubles, here into another state of mind, but a little sad. Of course, both aesthetic feeling and poetry involve extremely subjective feelings, so it is bound to be quite difficult to explain it rationally or make it universally recognized by everyone. What does this mean? At least, beauty and poetry, as pleasant things, most of us have some simple intuition, but we still need to learn and cultivate it. Aesthetic feeling is a kind of inner pleasure we get when facing the object; The difference between it and the so-called pleasure probably lies in the non-material desire that many people emphasize. And this is not born, mainly through the study of liberal arts.

A good liberal arts should teach people to be sober and caring.

As mentioned above, a good liberal arts should study and spread the good rules and methods of dealing with people in a society. It is certainly difficult to solve this problem. Because society is made up of living people, everyone is social and antisocial. On the one hand, they will cooperate with others, on the other hand, they always have the passion and desire to compete or even not cooperate with others. /kloc-tocqueville, a French thinker in the 0 th and 9 th centuries, believes that there are two kinds of passions. One is the passion of men, stronger than others. We might as well say that this is the heart of getting ahead and the desire for freedom. The other is sissy passion. I can't and won't let you do this, just like myself. I think this is almost the so-called heart of equality.

In modern society, when politics and liberal arts deal with this problem, it is normal to admit that these two passions are hard to destroy. Therefore, we simply regard freedom and equality as the basic values of a society's interaction with others, and focus on alleviating the conflict between the two values. The abnormal side is that modern society, politics and liberal arts generally do not pay much attention to the cooperation and love between people. Freedom and equality alone cannot unite society. In fact, if the latter aspect is brought into play, all kinds of social rules and political methods will become redundant. The way to show love is also very simple. Confucius said, don't do to others what you don't want; In the New Testament, love your neighbor as yourself. Everyone abides by such rules, and other rules are really useless. Of course, such a simple rule is not easy for everyone to do. However, I want to emphasize that not being able to do it completely does not mean that it is not important. I think a good liberal arts should encourage people's love while teaching people to recognize their shortcomings and complexity. And this kind of love is not based on narcissism and self-love, but the kind of love that begins when you stop loving yourself.

Good liberal arts should teach people to use beautiful words.

I once heard a friend say that a female directors in his hometown went out for a visit in vain to show appreciation. Seeing a house, she said, hey, it's really nice. When she entered the garden, she said, hey, it's beautiful. Then she saw a plum tree and said, hey, it's beautiful. On the way down, she saw everything and said, hey, it's beautiful. I think Lin Bu saw the same plum blossom, but he was not satisfied with saying that it was beautiful or really fragrant. Instead, I tried my best to come up with a sentence: the shadow is oblique, and the fragrance floats in the dusk. Although the expression of the former is simple, it is poor after all; The performance of the latter is beautiful words and beautiful articles.

Such examples abound. You praise other people's middle-aged women with "Xu Niang is old and charming", which is a cliche, and people are still angry after listening to it; You praised Su Dongpo with "a lotus blooming in Shang Yingying", which is really beautiful. Go to Manjue Dragon and smell osmanthus, you say, it smells good. When I went to Yang Gongdi Zhiweiguan, I smelled osmanthus fragrance again, but you still said: It smells good. This is stupid. If you say, Dongpo, Su Like, the water temple is full of fragrance. This is the spirit of literature. You always tell people to eat less beans to avoid farting in public. Although your intention is good, it's rude after all. However, you can also use English nursery rhymes: beans, beans, musical fruits. The more you eat, the louder you are. This is humor.

Then, why don't we say good things and write good words? I think a good liberal arts course should teach people to express themselves in American style.

The above six aspects are what I think a good liberal arts education should at least teach. Together, these things can at least help a person who has received liberal arts education and training to have a calm mind and live a quiet life. It is said that 87-year-old Mr. Pei said, "I take the time after waking up every morning as a gift, because it means I can work one day." This kind of mood is very similar to a sentence written by Si Kongtu, a poet in the late Tang Dynasty: "Buy apricot flowers and never return for ten years." Rockery western medicine column east, full of red branches. White-haired lovers, unscrewing and spinning into the air, are even more precious. Toast to the east wind at dusk, I am calm. "A good liberal arts should teach people like this; Smart people should study this from the arts and sciences. If we learn well, we will give full play to our IQ and EQ, and make our mediocre and trivial daily life less boring. There used to be an old saying: if you learn mathematics and physics well, you are not afraid to travel all over the world. In fact, I only study mathematics and physics, and I'm afraid of hiding at home. And my speech just wants to explain that learning liberal arts well is not afraid of how to live!

I hope I can help you.