First, the orientation of humanistic education: about "adult" education
Education was originally human education, but now we see that it unconsciously gives up the responsibility of educating "people" and dispels its own essence. Humanistic education has been neglected, while knowledge education and professional education have been strengthened. Once education is divorced from people, from people's soul or spirit, it is not education strictly. As Jaspers said: "Education is the education of human soul, not the accumulation of rational knowledge and understanding." In this sense, the important essential feature of education is its humanity, and humanistic education cannot be separated from education, including university education, which has an important basic position in university education.
Because of this, people keep calling for strengthening humanities education. However, we are faced with different choices and orientations about what kind of humanistic education to strengthen.
Generally speaking, when people talk about humanities education, it is not a definite and recognized meaning, but often expresses a variety of meanings. There are three most common types: one is humanistic education, the other is humanistic education, and the third is education about "adults". The following are the basic meanings of these three expressions.
The so-called humanistic education refers to the humanistic education in the European Renaissance. This is an educational thought and practice advocated by progressive thinkers and educators at that time. Starting from the interests of the emerging bourgeoisie and the theory of human nature, it broke through the rule of medieval scholasticism and church obscurantism education, praised people's value and strength, demanded freedom, equality and individual liberation, advocated the educational ideal of cultivating healthy, knowledgeable and versatile new people, and carried out educational innovation accordingly. It has important progressive significance in the history of modern education, and its basic spirit still has beneficial enlightenment to today's education. However, due to its historical limitations, its tendency to be divorced from reality in the subsequent development, and its increasing emphasis on mastering knowledge, this educational thought also had some adverse effects on European education at that time and later. ②
Humanistic education refers to education with humanity as its basic content. This kind of education is reflected in the "Six Arts" education in ancient China and the "Seven Arts" education tradition in Greece. Early humanistic education paid more attention to the value of mental training and emotional training than to training experts. However, with the development of social division of labor and the increasing differentiation of disciplines, the specialization of education has become increasingly obvious, and humanities education has also embarked on the road of continuous specialization, deviating from the original intention. At the same time, the basic purpose of humanities education is often limited by the cultural vision, which is only limited to the scope of pure humanities, which also forms an undue obstacle to the development of humanities education.
About "adult" education. This is aimed at ignoring people, using people as tools, or strengthening people's one-sided development and ignoring the coordinated development of people's body and mind. Based on the concept of holistic education, it strives to cultivate complete people through moral, intellectual and physical education, rather than "half-man" or "robot", emphasizes giving people extensive training rather than just professional training, and holds that the purpose of education is to make people's body and mind develop in an all-round way and become real people. In modern times, many educational reforms guided by humanistic philosophy and measures taken by some universities, such as general education, liberal arts education, general education, general education, cultural quality education, etc., have reflected this educational thought to some extent. Of course, this educational thought has never stopped the debate about people-oriented and society-oriented in practice.
Faced with the expression of the above three concepts of humanistic education, the basic connotation of humanistic education is the third one, that is, "adult" education. If we pay attention to the unity of humanistic culture and scientific culture, establish that people are the starting point of education, establish the dialectical unity view of people-oriented and society-oriented in values, emphasize the unity rather than separation of basic education and professional education, and absorb the basic spirit expressed by the first two kinds of humanistic education, then the view that humanistic education is "adult" education shows the significance and modern height of education.
Second, the definition of humanistic education: the essence is humanistic education, and the core is to cultivate humanistic spirit.
On the basis of the above analysis, we can make the following tentative definitions of humanistic education:
The so-called humanistic education refers to the education aimed at improving the human nature of the educated, shaping their ideal personality and realizing their personal and social values. Its essence is humanistic education, and its core is to cultivate humanistic spirit. Generally, this spirit should be cultivated through various channels, including extensive cultural knowledge, elegant cultural atmosphere, excellent cultural traditions and profound practical experience in life. This kind of education not only attaches importance to cultural cultivation from the outside to the inside, but also emphasizes self-realization and spiritual understanding. In the final analysis, it makes people understand and attach importance to the meaning of life, gives more humanistic care to the society, and fundamentally embodies the essence, people and ideals of education.
First of all, this definition regards humanistic education as human nature education and turns people into "adults". In fact, the requirements for "adult" education are different. The minimum requirement is to make people become people; Higher requirements make people become more complete people, that is, people with all-round development in morality, intelligence and physique; The highest requirement is to make people a perfect person, which is of course an ideal pursuit. Comenius has long pointed out: "If you want to form a person, you must form it by education." This is a basic requirement. Confucius is talking about high demands. "Lutz asked adults. Confucius said,' If Zang Wuzhong knows what people don't want, he will be brave in frontier villages, and Ran Qiu's skills, rites and music will also become an adult.' Say:' What is the necessity of being an adult today? See what is right, you can sacrifice your life for righteousness, and you can become an adult if you don't forget what you have said in life for a long time. ""(4) There have been endless debates about the good and evil of human nature in history. In fact, both the theory of good nature and the theory of evil nature are biased. Human nature has both evil and good sides. In this regard, perhaps it is precisely because of the former that talents need education and need to constantly transform themselves, and it is precisely because of the latter that talents can be educated. It is true that human nature education is necessary. It has always been the pursuit of education to suppress evil and promote good through education and achieve "stop at the best" In other words, there are not only good and evil in human nature, but also different realms. Our education should aim at guiding students to become noble people.
Originally, the fundamental mission of education is to "educate people". However, with the professional development of education and people's needs for job hunting and survival, people's education has been neglected, and people's education has become fashionable. Coupled with the prevalence of pragmatism and utilitarianism in education, people gradually forget the foundation of education and the human soul. We should integrate education divided into professional education and humanistic education, and regard humanistic education as the soul of education throughout education, otherwise our professional education will be difficult to succeed, and humanistic education will only become nothingness or embellishment.
Secondly, this definition defines the fundamental purpose of humanistic education as promoting the perfection of the educated's humanity, shaping their ideal personality and realizing their personal and social values, rather than cultivating professional workers. It is a non-professional and non-professional education, and its core is to cultivate and enrich the humanistic spirit, rather than staying in acquiring relevant humanistic knowledge. The acquisition of knowledge is of course necessary, but it is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to improve human nature through self-realization and spiritual understanding. Comrade Mao Zedong has long said, "People should have a little spirit". This spirit is the human spirit, the national spirit and the human spirit. This spirit is the spirit of constantly improving human nature, rather than reducing human nature to animal nature. In fact, once people lose their humanity, the consequences will be unimaginable. Therefore, when we talk about human education and human nature education today, we not only ask people to be kind to themselves, others and society, but also to nature, the environment we live in today, fully understand the meaning of life and unify the meaning of life with social values.
Thirdly, this definition looks at humanistic education from the perspective of the whole culture and the concept of unity of knowledge and action, not only from the perspective of humanistic culture, but also from the perspective of educators. Based on this, the definition puts forward the realization process of the goal of humanistic education, which is realized through extensive cultural knowledge, elegant cultural atmosphere, excellent cultural tradition and profound life practice experience. The process of cultivating humanistic spirit through humanistic education is an internal growth and cultural process of self-awareness and improving the realm of human nature, a process of integrating knowledge with practice, not a pure internal growth process, nor a pure cultural process. Of course, this is not a process of separation between knowledge and practice.
For a long time, there has been a misunderstanding in educational understanding and practice, thinking that humanistic education is only humanistic education. Undoubtedly, humanities education is an important aspect, but not the whole. If it is limited to this, it will not only narrow the content of humanities education, but also misunderstand education itself. It will make educators, including professional teachers and educational administrators, in a state of inaction in humanities education, and will also put some important cultural classics in natural science and social science out of the reading range, resulting in the lack of necessary nourishing elements for humanities education objects and the loss of teachers' support for humanities educators. The result is extremely unfavorable to the development of humanistic education, and it also affects humanistic education. We must broaden our educational horizons in the practice of humanistic education, establish a correct educational concept, and improve the educational effect by combining the reality of the educational object. Among them, it is an important way to guide students to read cultural classics extensively and offer necessary classic reading guidance courses, because the cultural classics accumulated by human beings for thousands of years contain rich humanistic education ideological nutrients.
In addition, our humanities education often focuses on classroom and teaching, but ignores the creation of cultural atmosphere and the individual life experience of students. From this point of view, a comprehensive university with strong arts and sciences has the advantage of discipline culture, which silently affects its campus cultural atmosphere, while a single engineering college, polytechnic college and even science and technology college have some congenital deficiencies, so that it is often difficult to make great efforts to create a proper cultural atmosphere, thus reducing the cultural implication of students' self-experience. What's more, this kind of defect is deeply imprinted in the school tradition, which deeply affects the psychology of faculty and staff and forms a certain mindset that is not conducive to humanistic education.
All these are to give a reasonable definition to modern humanistic education. However, due to lack of ability and in-depth thinking, its shortcomings are inevitable. It is precisely because of this that this definition is descriptive, and this description is expected to deepen through the development of people's understanding. Just like the various forms of humanistic education, it has its historical and understanding fluidity.
Third, the core disciplines of humanities education: humanities, history, philosophy, art and other humanities.
It is true that the vision of humanistic education here is on the overall cultural view, that is, it is not limited to the scope of subject knowledge, but also involves cultural atmosphere and student experience; Discipline is not limited to humanities, but also includes the essence of human understanding of nature, society and self precipitated in the fields of natural science and social science, from which people can get wisdom enlightenment and spiritual impact; And all this, through its layers of shells, goes deep into the core to absorb spiritual nutrients. This has been discussed before. One question to be discussed here is: as far as discipline is concerned, what is the core discipline of humanities education? The answer is: philosophy, literature, history, art and other humanities. That is to say, although humanities education involves a wide range of knowledge of human culture and various implementation methods, as far as the subject scope is concerned, it still has its own core disciplines, namely philosophy, literature, history, art and other humanities. This is because:
1. Humanities has a unique research object.
There is a passage in the explanation of the Encyclopedia of International Education: "Humanities studies the history of human activities and observes the objects shaped by human experience and imagination. The study of philosophy, the interpretation of literature and history, and the criticism of art, music and opera are all exploring the limits, depth and ability of the human spirit. " ⑤ The British Concise Encyclopedia also pointed out: "It is generally believed that the humanities constitute a unique knowledge, that is, the humanities about human values and spiritual expression." As far as modern disciplines are concerned, humanities mainly include social sciences with humanistic content or using humanistic methods such as language, literature, history, philosophy and art. In a word, the humanities has a unique research object, which constitutes a special kind of knowledge and is a discipline that studies human values and spiritual expressions. As Mr. Du Weiming said, "the true emotion of literature, the collective memory of history, the wisdom of philosophy and the ultimate concern of religion are all academic fields closely related to human existence, human existence and significance." The achievements in this academic field, especially cultural classics, are undoubtedly rare teaching materials about humanities education.
2. Humanities has a unique way of thinking and research methods.
The way of thinking of humanities is different from natural science and social science, which is determined by its specific research object. This particular research object-people, people's value, people's spirit and people's spiritual world-has some particularity or individuality, so it is difficult to carry out experiments repeatedly like natural science and adopt a completely quantitative analysis method, because humanistic social phenomena contain people's thoughts, feelings and values, and are individual and inaccurate, so it is impossible to describe and analyze them purely objectively. Therefore, understanding, interpretation, reflection, experience and sentiment are its fundamental research methods. It is this mode of thinking and research method that helps people to know themselves, understand others and deal with interpersonal relationships and various complex problems in society with a correct attitude.
3. Humanities has a unique social critical function and critical spirit.
One of the important functions of a university is its social criticism function. This function is embodied in every discipline, especially the humanities. As Mr. Du Weiming pointed out, "the humanities have the greatest potential to play this social function." (8) Philosophy reveals the profundity of problems, literature portrays the characters in a bitter way, and historical records are ruthless, which is unmatched by other disciplines. Therefore, the humanities has the most direct and far-reaching influence on people's mind, the formation of people's critical spirit, the promotion of human nature and the shaping of personality.
It is the above factors, that is, the unique research object, unique thinking mode and research method and special critical spirit of humanities, that show that humanities, especially philosophy, literature, history and art, should become the core discipline of humanities education in the scope of disciplines. It is precisely because of this that the state should attach importance to the professional education of humanities. That is to say, although the humanities education we refer to is broad, it is not professional, but it is closely related to the humanities education in the professional sense, because the humanities education in the professional sense can provide in-depth courses for the humanities education in the broad sense, cultivate high-level teachers and improve the humanistic atmosphere, thus directly or indirectly promoting the humanities education in colleges and universities.
(Note: This article is the author's speech at the first "China High-level Forum on Humanities Education")