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Social Status, Functions and Labor Characteristics of Teachers
First, the social status and role of teachers
(A) the emergence and development of teachers' profession
Education is a social practice of human beings, but there is no special school education and teacher occupation in primitive society. After mankind entered the slave society, words and schools appeared, and the division of labor between mental and physical labor also developed. In the early days of slave society, the main people in charge of culture were state officials and wizards, who engaged in specialized cultural arrangement, research and teaching, and also held certain official positions in the government. In feudal society, with the complexity of the school structure and the expansion of the scale, the teacher profession began to develop in the direction of specialization.
In capitalist society, with the development of modern science and technology and industry and the wide application of science and technology in production, it is necessary to train not only educated workers who know technology, but also a large number of scientific and technological experts with innovative ability. At this time, not only compulsory primary education was popularized, but also secondary and higher education developed rapidly. With the complexity of the educational structure and the expansion of the educational scale, the primary normal, secondary normal and higher normal education that specially trains teachers came into being, and the teachers' profession became more specialized and specialized.
With the arrival of knowledge-based economy, high-tech industry will become the leading industry in the economic sector, and traditional industries will also be high-tech. Scientific and technological innovation is the basis of developing high-tech industries, and cultivating high-quality scientific and technological talents with innovative ability has become the key to the development of knowledge economy. Therefore, we must vigorously develop education and improve the quality of teachers. In the era of knowledge economy, the development of science and technology is accelerating, and the updating of knowledge is also accelerating. Therefore, mankind will enter a learning society, and adult education and continuing education will continue to develop. This will inevitably lead to the further expansion of teachers' profession and the further improvement of teachers' quality.
(B) the social status of teachers
Teachers are called "engineers of the human soul". Throughout the ages, many thinkers and scientists have been engaged in the teaching profession. On the one hand, they are engaged in cultural research and dissemination, on the other hand, they cultivate talents and make contributions to the development of human society. Throughout the ages, many thinkers and educators have spoken highly of teachers' work, arguing that teachers should gain lofty social status and society should respect them. The ruling class or politicians who are in the rising or progressive stage in Chinese and foreign history generally respect teachers.
Xu Teli (1877— 1968) was an outstanding proletarian educator in modern China. He founded Changsha Normal School in Hunan Province, the first provincial women's normal school, Changsha Women's Normal School and other schools, and served as the principal. During the Great Revolution, he served as the education director of Hunan Peasant Association and the director of the peasant movement workshop. Since 1930, he has been the main member of the education department of our party, acting minister of the Central Soviet Area, minister of education, director of education in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia border region, deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the CPC Central Committee (in charge of education) and director of the education research office. At the same time, he also served as the president of Lenin Normal School in the Central Soviet Area, the director of the textbook editorial board, the vice president of Soviet University (presiding over the daily work), the president of the Central Agricultural School, the president of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region New Education Association, the president of the New Education Association, and the president of Yan' an Academy of Natural Sciences. He attached great importance to normal education and teachers' work all his life, advocated "the unity of teachers and teachers" and "teachers should be gardeners rather than woodcutter", and often encouraged normal students to devote themselves to education with his own experience. As a generation of teachers, he has been engaged in education all his life. Mao Zedong called him "revolution first, work first, others first", Zhou Enlai called him "the light of the people, the glory of the party" and Zhu De called him "a saint today". There are Xu Teli Wen Cun and Xu Teli's Analects of Education handed down from generation to generation.
In ancient China, Confucianism attached great importance to the status of teachers and often compared teachers to kings. "History? Thailand vowed: "God bless the people and be the king's teacher. "Regard Jun and Shi as a whole or juxtapose Jun and Shi in the same position. Xun Kuang further put the teacher into the sequence of "heaven, earth, monarch and relatives". He said: "Heaven and earth are the foundation of life", "ancestors are the foundation of class" and "monarch and teacher are the foundation of governance". ("Xunzi? The theory of ceremony). From the Han and Tang Dynasties to the Ming and Qing Dynasties, there were great scholars. These people are knowledgeable, and students can teach teachers according to moral standards.
In ancient Greece, the example of western kings respecting teachers and valuing morality can be illustrated by the close relationship between King Alexander of Macedonia and Aristotle. During the Renaissance, the bourgeoisie began to step onto the historical stage, and many people also paid universal respect to the teaching profession. Comenius, a Czech educator, said, "What better and greater contribution can we make to our country than educating young people?" In his view, a teacher is the most beautiful and glorious position in the world. In modern times, due to the more and more extensive application of science and technology in production and the higher education level of workers, governments all over the world attach great importance to education and vigorously improve the treatment and status of teachers.
After the victory of the socialist revolution in October, the Soviet Union emphasized the need to improve the social status of teachers. Kalinin, a proletarian revolutionary and educator, praised teachers as "engineers of the human soul". Lenin put forward: "It is impossible and impossible to raise the people's teachers in our country to an unprecedented lofty position in bourgeois society." At the same time, it is emphasized that on the one hand, it is necessary to improve their literacy commensurate with this status, "and the most important thing is to improve their material living conditions." Since then, the Soviet government has made unremitting efforts to raise teachers' salaries, and at the same time, it has improved teachers' status by awarding honorary titles and medals to outstanding educators.
(C) the social role of teachers
1. Choose, spread, promote and create human culture through educational activities.
The difference between man and animals lies in man's conscious initiative. People's conscious initiative is mainly manifested in their ability to understand and transform the world. Understanding the world and transforming the world are interactive, so are the creation of new culture and the inheritance of the original culture. It is in the interaction between understanding the world and transforming the world, and in the interaction between new culture and original culture that human beings are promoting the continuous progress of the whole human culture and society. Therefore, the new generation should master the existing culture created by human beings before entering social life.
Mastering human culture by the younger generation is the process of human cultural inheritance. School is the place where human culture is handed over and passed down from generation to generation, and teachers are the executors. Here, teachers are disseminators, transmitters and receivers of human culture, and students are receivers, inheritors and inheritors of human culture. School education is a purposeful, planned and organized dissemination of culture, which is different from other mass media and cultural publishing undertakings. Teachers should turn the demands and expectations of the society for the new generation into their specific expectations for each student, and he should explain, explain and demonstrate the knowledge according to the students' reality to ensure students' understanding and mastery. It is conscious, scientific, reasonable and professional for schools and teachers to inherit human culture from generation to generation.
Teachers do not play the role of megaphone in the process of transmitting human culture. They should not only explain, explain and display knowledge, but also choose, promote and create human culture. The so-called choice is to choose real scientific knowledge, excellent human culture, cultural knowledge in line with the spirit of truth, goodness and beauty, and cultural knowledge suitable for students to accept. The so-called promotion and creation refers to the teacher's explanation, explanation and demonstration of textbook knowledge. We should combine our own experiences, expound and carry forward the excellent cultural traditions of mankind, and guide and motivate students to pursue truth, goodness and beauty. Teachers' explanation, explanation and demonstration of knowledge in textbooks should combine the latest development of human science and culture, create their own, explain their latest connotation and significance, and upgrade to a new level.
2. Cultivate people by imparting cultural knowledge to the educated.
Compared with imparting cultural knowledge, educating people is a more essential social function of teachers' profession. Educating people here refers to cultivating and developing people's quality. The quality mentioned here refers to people's acquired quality, which is a stable physical and mental quality or characteristic of people formed and displayed in social practice based on people's innate natural quality and through the mastery of human culture. The mastery of cultural knowledge here is the condition for the formation of people's quality, but the mastery of cultural knowledge is not just people's quality. There are both connections and differences between them. From the mastery of cultural knowledge to the formation of quality, it needs the exercise and practice of knowledge. People's quality includes basic national quality and various professional or professional qualities. National basic quality mainly includes ideological and moral quality, intellectual quality, physical and mental quality, labor and life skills quality. Professional or professional quality refers to the quality that needs to be shown in various professional or professional activities.
In the era of knowledge economy, scientific and technological innovation will become the basis of developing high-tech and high-tech industries, and cultivating scientific and technological innovation talents will be the key to improving comprehensive national strength and international competitiveness. Scientific and technological innovation talents have a complex quality structure, and it is a long and arduous process to cultivate high-quality talents with this complex structure, which requires teachers to play their initiative and positive role. Scientific and technological innovative talents with the mission of developing high technology must have a high sense of responsibility, mission and dedication, which requires the positive influence of teachers. Scientific and technological innovation talents in the high-tech era mainly cultivate the ability to choose, apply and create new knowledge, which requires teachers' careful design and training. In the modern society with fierce competition at home and abroad, scientific and technological innovation talents should also pay attention to the exercise of psychological balance, dare to face challenges and meet challenges, which also requires the guidance and training of teachers.
3. Promote the all-round development of human society by transmitting culture and cultivating people.
All material wealth and spiritual wealth in the world are created by human beings themselves, all human activities are activities of inventing and applying culture, and everything created by human beings is the materialization or objectification of human knowledge. Therefore, teachers can promote the development of human society by imparting cultural knowledge and cultivating talents. For example, workers who have the knowledge and technology cultivated by teachers in educational activities can use their own knowledge and technology to manufacture material products; Scientific and technological experts trained by teachers through education can use their creative activities to discover new scientific principles or invent new technologies, thus creating new products or improving product quality by improving technologies.
Teachers not only carry forward and create culture through their own educational and teaching activities, but also cultivate scientific and cultural research talents through spreading culture and promote the development of scientific and cultural undertakings.
Second, the characteristics of teachers' labor
complexity
The complexity of teachers' labor is first determined by the complexity of educational objects. The object of education is people, especially the growing teenagers. There are many factors in people's growth, including heredity, environment, education and people's initiative. If these factors are ignored, they may bring losses to the growth of teenagers. People's different growth processes will also form different personality characteristics, which will also become a factor affecting education. The complexity of teachers' labor is also determined by the complexity of educational tasks. The purpose and task of education is to make teenagers develop morally, intellectually, physically and aesthetically in an all-round way. These aspects are mutually restricted and promoted. From the goal and task of intellectual education, we should not only impart knowledge and skills to students, but also develop students' intelligence and ability, especially their ability of analyzing and solving problems, practical operation and innovation and entrepreneurship. The structure and tasks of moral education, physical education and aesthetic education are also very complicated. The complexity of teachers' labor is also determined by the complexity of educational process, educational methods and educational means. The education process is a systematic project, which is to achieve a complex and comprehensive task goal, that is, to form people, through the interaction of various factors in a limited time. This process is necessarily complicated. Different educational goals will have different teaching methods, structures or models.
(2) Creativity
As far as imparting knowledge is concerned, teachers cannot simply impart the knowledge discovered and summarized by scientists to students, but must process the knowledge to make it easy for students to understand and accept. In order to help students master a certain concept or principle, teachers often need to choose various materials, adopt certain methods and means to help students understand, and achieve the purpose of mastering through practice. This requires teachers to pay creative labor. Not to mention ideological education, developing intelligence and ability, and cultivating good psychological quality. At the same time, with the rapid development of modern science and technology, knowledge is updated very quickly. In order to let students master the basic knowledge, basic concepts and basic principles in textbooks, teachers should integrate the latest modern knowledge to make the learning of knowledge fresh and contemporary, which also requires teachers' creation. What's more, the educational objects faced by teachers are constantly changing, and each student has his own growth conditions and different personality characteristics. In this way, the educational scene faced by teachers is complex, which requires teachers to carry out creative work. Finally, the education process should cultivate students' creativity, which requires teachers to design creative activities and cultivate students' creative needs, creative character and creative thinking ability, thus showing the creativity of teachers' labor.
(3) Demonstration
The demonstration of teachers' labor is first determined by the subjectivity of educational content, methods and means and their consistency with educational results. The process of education is that teachers educate people by imparting knowledge. Teachers first integrate the educational content through their own understanding, transform the knowledge, skills, world outlook and thoughts and feelings contained in it into their own things, process them on the basis of understanding the students' knowledge level and psychological state, and master them by their own words and deeds with the help of certain teaching means. Here, the contents, methods and means of education have gone through a subjective process. Educational achievements are the knowledge, skills, abilities, world outlook, thoughts and feelings acquired by students, and are also included in teachers' main body and their activities, which are consistent. Therefore, teachers should not use textbooks, teaching methods and teaching means to teach students, but use their own knowledge, skills, abilities, world outlook and thoughts and feelings, and use teachers' personality to teach students. The demonstration of teachers' labor is also determined by the characteristics of human cognitive process and psychological process. People's mastery of knowledge and psychological development are based on perceptual activities, and concrete and realistic things are most easily reflected psychologically. Teachers use their own language, images, activities and passions to express the connotation of knowledge, which helps students master the connotation of knowledge and leave a deep impression. The demonstration of teachers' labor is also determined by the psychological characteristics of teenagers. Teenagers and children are full of imitation and easy to be hinted. They all regard teachers as the embodiment of knowledge, the representative of noble personality and natural imitators. Teachers' thinking and behavior, knowledge-seeking spirit, scientific attitude and way of thinking all play an exemplary role in students.
(d) long-term
It takes a long time for teachers to train talents through labor. It takes six years for a person to acquire the ability of reading, writing and calculating in primary school, six years for a middle school to master the basic knowledge and ability of various subjects, four to five years for a university to become a professional in a certain field, and three to six years for a graduate school to become a senior professional. As Guan Zhong, an ancient thinker in China, said: "A year's plan is nothing more than a tree valley; The ten-year plan is nothing more than a tree; A lifelong plan is nothing more than a tree. " ("pipe? Full show "). Every stage of human growth, the formation of a basic viewpoint or the improvement of a certain ideology and morality takes a long time, and it often takes many repetitions to mature. An important manifestation of the long-term nature of teachers' labor is that the effect of labor takes a long time to test. A person's growth in each stage can also test the educational effect, but the talent growth and educational effect can only be tested after participating in independent social practice. The long-term effect of this labor society is manifested in two aspects: aftereffect and long-term effect, that is, talent growth and educational effect will play a role in people's life.
(edited by Huang Ji, etc. of Primary Education)
Huang Ji, editor-in-chief of Elementary Education, People's Education Press.