What is "common sense"? There is a misunderstanding.
China has made many attempts and detours in general education in the past eighteen years. It must be said that China's higher education has taken a big step from the professional education under the Soviet model in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China to the wide-caliber professional education based on general education. However, the development of general education in universities is still not optimistic, and many people have misunderstandings about general education.
What is "common sense"? Many people understand that all majors in arts and sciences have dabbled in it and become "generalists". In this regard, Shao, director of the Institute of Education of Beijing Institute of Technology, believes that general education is an educational concept first, and then a talent training model. Aiming at the problems of knowledge separation and utilitarian pursuit caused by over-specialization, general education emphasizes the cultivation of people with sound personality.
Lin, a professor from Tsinghua University, Taiwan Province, took universities in Taiwan Province as an example to express his views on general education. He believes that universities should "take general education as the body and career development as the purpose". Confucius advocated "the teaching of six arts", that is, etiquette, music, shooting, imperial examination, calligraphy and mathematics are interlinked with liberal arts education in universities, so he further deduced that "the teaching of six arts" is general education.
The general courses in universities are "mixed in content and poor in quality"
At the meeting, many experts mentioned that there is a widespread imbalance between arts and sciences in higher education. Shao, a Pang Hai, pointed out that the common problems of public elective courses in colleges and universities at present are "complicated content, disordered structure, poor quality and low status", and the concept of quality has not been well reflected, and the education of humanities, social sciences and natural sciences is seriously unbalanced.
Wu Shuoxian, an academician of the China Academy of Sciences and a professor at the School of Architecture, South China University of Technology, also said that the lack of communication between arts and sciences is an easy drawback of modern education. Especially in today's China, middle schools often implement the liberal arts placement system prematurely, while universities are too biased towards professional education and fail to seriously implement general education. In this case, many liberal arts students lack basic scientific and technological knowledge; Many science and engineering students lack literature and social science literacy and aesthetic consciousness. The students trained in this way will become the kind of "A Ying" criticized by Mr. Liang Sicheng, rather than all-round talents.
Experts attending the meeting agreed that it is necessary to integrate educational resources and optimize the development model of general education in colleges and universities. Zhao Zhihong, deputy director of the Academic Affairs Office of NTU, believes that colleges and universities should pool high-quality teaching resources, consolidate mature teaching models, set up books and teaching materials for general education, hire high-level professors outside the school to open general education lecture halls, and strengthen inter-school cooperation.
The model of "teachers tell students to listen" is out of date.
Xiang Cong, deputy director of the Academic Affairs Office of South China University of Technology, quoted two students when talking about how to reform and explore the school: One student thinks: "The teaching methods of general education should be more diverse, not just on the teacher's podium, but students should listen below and participate more, not teachers. You can consider setting up interest groups or research groups, choosing research topics and studying your favorite topics. " Another student thinks: "Some teachers are very experienced, but boring PPT and lengthy theoretical concepts have lost a large number of students. In the end, these teachers can only keep their students by calling the roll. In fact, we prefer teachers who can get along with students and have strong affinity. "
"The purpose of general selection is to cultivate students' extracurricular hobbies and other qualities different from majors. Such a general choice is meaningful. "Xiang Cong believes that the reform of general education courses is necessary, so that students can go to their favorite general education courses and really learn something.