An American teacher told a story in a medical college in China:
One morning after the storm, a man was walking by the sea and noticed that there were many small fish washed ashore by last night's storm in the shallow water pit of the beach. Although there may be hundreds or even thousands of small fish trapped near the sea surface, it won't be long before the water in the shallow pit will be sucked up by sand and evaporated by the sun, and the small fish will dry up and die.
The man suddenly found a little boy at the seaside. He kept picking up small fish from the shallow water pit and throwing them back into the sea. The man couldn't help walking over: "son, there are hundreds of thousands of small fish in this puddle." You can't save them. "
"I know." The little boy answered without looking back.
"oh? Then why are you still throwing? Who cares? "
"This little fish cares!" The boy replied, picked up a fish and threw it back into the sea.
In fact, this story just corresponds to an old Tagore saying, "The purpose of education should be to convey the breath of life to people." Therefore, the "teaching" of education should start with respecting life, making human nature good, broadening people's minds and arousing their own beautiful "good roots", that is, let students have a beautiful state of mind of "this fish cares".
A survivor of a Nazi concentration camp became the principal of a middle school in the United States. Whenever a new teacher comes to school, he will send a letter to the teacher, which reads: "Dear teacher, I saw with my own eyes what humans should not see: the gas chamber was built by an engineer with expertise; Children were poisoned by knowledgeable doctors; Young children were killed by trained nurses. Seeing all this, I wonder: What is education for? My request is: please help students grow into people. The ability to read, write and calculate is valuable only when our children grow into human beings. "
Obviously, human beings have an animal side and an angel side. The purpose of educators is to make people's souls get exercise, overcome animal nature and turn into angels.
Education is the education of human soul, not the simple accumulation of rational knowledge and cognition. This is the long-term and grand ultimate goal of education. Otherwise, the more knowledge you have, the greater the harm to human beings and life.
The lesson in this respect is too painful: Lu Gang, a proté gé of Dr. Li Zhengdao, lost the thesis prize and fell into jealousy and disappointment. He even shot and killed four space physicists, and then killed his prize-winning classmate. Liu, a 0/6-year-old boy from Xuanhua/Kloc, Henan, quarreled with his girlfriend, so he drove wildly and ran over a pedestrian, resulting in 2 deaths 13 injuries.
At present, our school education often ignores the cultivation of students' basic personality, basic morality and basic emotions, so that some students are becoming more and more indifferent, indifferent and even cold to life and the world.
Therefore, a Japanese educator once said that we should cultivate students' feelings of "facing a bunch of wild chrysanthemums, and their hearts are aching", which is the feelings of a person who cares about the life of every small fish on the beach. Otherwise, treating small fish like dirt and ravaging flowers, even though their moral scores may be high, will lose the value of human life.
Respect for people and awe of the universe are the most basic things to respect the existence of life and know that life is not repeated. People should not be deprived of life for no reason, even if it is a very low life. When a person has no compassion for low-level creatures or animals, can you expect him to respect high-level life? On the contrary, when a person is full of care for the lives of grass and small fish, can he not respect advanced life and human life?
The ancients said, "There is no greater sorrow than death in the heart." A person who is indifferent to the outside world is a hopeless person; A nation composed of many people who are indifferent to life is a hopeless nation.
As an educator, there may be a lot of specific work to do and a lot of specific homework to grasp, but to cultivate students' good ideological quality and humanistic feelings, the most basic, fundamental and important thing is to awaken students' conscience of respecting life.