The word "citizen", according to the interpretation of Ci Hai, is "a person with the nationality of a country. Including minors and people deprived of political rights. " According to this definition, the concept of "citizen" is equivalent to "national", that is to say, for all people in a country, solid civic education is also national education. In addition, Cihai also specifically mentioned the provisions of our Constitution on the rights and obligations of citizens: "Anyone who has the nationality of China people is a citizen of China people. All China people and citizens are equal before the law. Any citizen enjoys the rights stipulated by the Constitution and laws, and at the same time must fulfill the obligations stipulated by the Constitution and laws. " This provision is a supplement to the previous definition, that is, "citizen" refers not only to a person with the nationality of a country, but also to the subject of rights and obligations stipulated in the Constitution. Therefore, the moral education related to citizens is not only the moral education of the whole people, but also the moral education related to citizens as the subject of legal political rights and obligations.
Based on the above interpretation of civic moral education, this paper wants to put forward and hope to arouse people's thinking on two issues: how to carry out civic moral education aimed at moral maturity in such a far immature society and the whole people lacking a group of educators with moral maturity, so as to promote the maturity of society, in other words, how to make "saints inside and kings outside" no longer be "dark and unknown, depressed and underdeveloped" citizens, but also be the subject of rights and obligations. Civic education, which was popular overseas, was simplified to civic moral education after its introduction. Then, in the absence of civic rights education, how to carry out civic moral education, what possible consequences will it have, and how to deal with the relationship between citizens as subjects of rights and obligations within the framework of civic moral education.
In order to explain the above two problems in detail, this paper comes down to five dilemmas. The following points are described.
First, the status quo of civic moral education dilemma
What are civic education and civic moral education? We might as well refer to the part about "citizen and moral education" in recommendation 64 of 1968 International Education Conference: "The purpose of civic education is not only to increase students' understanding of state institutions and cultivate their loyalty, but also to familiarize students with the role of international institutions in promoting human welfare and instill a sense of responsibility in them to enhance the effectiveness of these institutions in the future." "In moral and religious education, the teaching of international understanding should be straightforward, clear and definite, and emphasize the moral foundation of human unity. Its purpose is to cultivate a sense of morality and social responsibility for others, a desire to act for common interests and a determination to commit to peace. The teaching of science and philosophy should have the same goal. "In this discussion, more attention is paid to the part of civic moral education, especially the moral sense and social responsibility of others. The main body of civic education is mainly considered from the aspect of obligatory subjects. In recommendation No.78 of 1992 International Education Conference, the significance of "developing ethics and civic values" was mentioned again: "The education system should play a basic role in ethics, civic awareness and moral education, and supplement the role played by the family. The education system, together with other institutions, should help promote human rights, foster democratic behavior and define values that have never been more necessary, such as respect for human dignity, tolerance, dialogue, solidarity and mutual assistance. "Here, for the education of civic morality and values, we should pay attention to mutual respect and help among the subjects of rights. The subjects of civic education are mainly considered from the aspects of the subjects of rights.
Because citizens are the unity of rights and obligations, accordingly, civic education should include two basic aspects: civic rights education and compulsory education. If we only pay attention to the former and ignore the latter, then members of society will be popular with moral indulgence and generally lack a sense of obligation and social responsibility; If we only emphasize the latter and ignore the former. Then this society will lack humanity and civilization and move towards barbarism. These two aspects must be closely combined, otherwise it will bring bad consequences.
In the moral chaos we are facing at present, the first problem is the lack of social morality and corruption. Although the individual's private morality is not satisfactory, the Confucian norms and ideas about personal private morality in dealing with their own relations with others are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. Although it has been destroyed, it is still a normal way of interpersonal relationship. People's social morality is the concentrated expression of a country's people's mental outlook and moral quality. In terms of social morality, traditional moral theory pays insufficient attention to it, and more importantly, it is restricted by civil rights education. Civil rights education is related to the establishment of civil rights. Civil rights education is to implement and consolidate the legal freedom and rights endowed by the Constitution in the form of education, but it must be based on the specific protection of civil rights by the legislative, administrative and judicial systems. The reason is very simple, there is no civil rights education with abstract rights as its content. Citizen's right education and citizen's compulsory education show the dialectical relationship of opposition and complementarity in establishing social morality. The essence of social morality is social responsibility. The lack of compulsory education for citizens will lead to the lack of national social responsibility, and the lack of civil rights and corresponding education will also lead to the same result. The establishment of social responsibility depends on the establishment of the subject status of each citizen's rights. Only by establishing one's status as the subject of rights can one truly feel that one is the master of society and has an irresistible sense of responsibility for society. Related to this, whether it is civic moral education or broader civic education, it is reasonable to include moral education that respects the rights, freedoms and dignity of others.
The lack of sense of obligation can't be cured by carrying out compulsory education for citizens in a straight line, because the root cause is mostly on the other side of obligation. What kind of achievements can we expect from civic moral education when civic education is simplified to civic moral education and civic rights education is absent? Whether or not civic morality can play a role, morality itself will fall into absurd consequences: if morality is strong, then morality without the protection of civil rights is immoral, and the practical result of this "immoral morality" is nothing more than repeating the "killing people by reason" of Song Confucianism; If morality is weak, the so-called civic moral construction will eventually become a hypocrisy in oral preaching and practice.
Second, the plight of the theory of civic moral education
Citizen's moral education is the education to improve citizen's moral quality. As mentioned earlier, it is a universal education for all social citizens. The guiding theory of civic moral education should have the same universality. At present, Chinese mainland's dominant moral theory is the moral theory of cultivating a few special "elites", that is, the moral theory of cultivating the vanguard of the proletariat, or the education of cultivating successors. There is a considerable distance between the two. In the practice of moral education, this improper orientation also puts moral education in an awkward position: the current moral education is only a vassal of political education. Taking the keynote speech of the judging meeting of "Research and Experiment on the Overall Construction of School Moral Education System, a National Key Project of National Education Science in the Ninth Five-Year Plan" published in Moral Education Information as an example, the moral education work in this paper has to face three basic tasks: to cope with the international situation and to serve "the struggle with the West in infiltration and reverse osmosis, competition and anti-competition, subversion and anti-subversion". Therefore, "How to strengthen the country? In view of the development of science and technology, "how to occupy the network position with correct, positive and healthy ideological and cultural information in accordance with the spirit of" seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages "and the principle of" making full use of, actively building and strengthening management "is also a new situation and task facing moral education. To cope with the international situation, how to seriously study and guide young students to correctly understand the national conditions and the long-term, complex and arduous nature of reform, distinguish the mainstream from the tributaries, correctly treat some negative phenomena, and establish a correct world outlook, outlook on life and values is another new situation faced by moral education and another new task put forward. " Although this paper thinks that quality education should put moral education in the first place, it also emphasizes that "ideological and political quality is the most important quality". We don't doubt the promotion of this topic to moral education, and we don't deny the practical urgency of the above problems, but it needs to be pointed out that the above problems are not the core and focus of moral education, and moral education should not serve the solution of the above problems. Within the existing educational framework, these problems in the political and ideological fields should be the content scope of political education, moral education and political education should have a clear division of labor, and there should be clear boundaries in the content and purpose of education. In the relationship between concept and reason, the purpose and function of moral education and political education are different: one is to educate people and teach them how to be human. One is that the reason for educating a special kind of person (such as * * * proletarian successor) is to teach how to be a special kind of person (such as "successor", although this concept is quite doubtful from the existing practice of power change), while the latter should be based on the former, but it has put the cart before the horse in moral education practice. In this sense, it is not unusual for a large number of political educators to talk about moral education. Kind? Hey? Pregnant? Old fiber load? What happened to death? Lai Lu fled/p >
At present, one of the important contents of civic moral education is the education of Chinese traditional virtues. Chinese traditional virtue, as a part of the excellent traditional culture of the Chinese nation, is the cultural root of why China people are from China and China is the Chinese nation. However, in reality, it is very strange that we contemporary China people, who have inherited our own traditional virtues, are in an awkward position in terms of legitimacy. Since the fall of Kongjiadian, the traditional culture dominated by Confucianism was once swept into the garbage dump of history. In 1980s, with the "traditional culture craze" of intellectuals and mass society, traditional culture was brought back to the historical stage. On the other hand, traditional culture cannot find a suitable place to exist. In the existing old moral theory system with strong ideological discourse color, the theoretical basis on which traditional virtues depend cannot be established, the legitimacy and legitimacy of traditional virtues in moral theory have not been solved, and the current orthodox theory has not given it a solid and reasonable foundation. On the surface, this problem seems to be the problem of moral theory itself, but in essence it is still the result of indifference between moral education and political education (this confusion is also manifested in the use of "morality" and "thought" by some scholars), that is, the result of replacing universality with particularity.
Third, the dilemma of educators.
A question corresponding to what kind of theory is used to guide education is what kind of people to educate. In the current moral education system, the role of moral educators has two undertakers: first, the party or government will educate the broad masses of the people; The second is the intergenerational education of the older generation to the younger generation or the older generation to the next generation. We discuss the roles of these two educators respectively.
Moral education for citizens is an unshirkable responsibility of the rulers. Moral education promoted and led by the government is an ancient historical tradition in China, which is rooted in the practice of rule of virtue supplemented by moral education, and is also a contemporary feature of some East Asian countries, such as the practice in Singapore.
This moral education model, which is promoted and led by the government as an educator, is also called the government-driven moral education model in academic discussions. Its opposite mode is folk-led or social-led, and the latter is also understood as a gradual moral education mode. Generally speaking, on the positive side, the moral education model promoted by the government can make use of unparalleled administrative power to conduct a lot of moral theoretical research, formulate moral norms and implement moral education, and achieve certain obvious results in a short time. However, this view is also quite debatable. The concept of "government-driven" is borrowed from the field of legal construction, and can also be applied to the description of government behavior in the field of morality. However, the role of government promotion in the legal and moral fields is very different. In the field of legal system construction, the government (including the administrative and judicial systems) can solve the confusion in the legal field through a lot of legislation in a short time. In the field of moral construction, the research of moral theory, the formulation of norms and the implementation of moral education promoted by the government may be vigorous and in full swing, but it may not be helpful to improve moral quality and orderly ethical life. The difference is that the legal field has distinct compulsion, while the moral field has no legal compulsion. Even the coercion of public opinion condemnation seems to have no effect in today's moral relaxation, value confusion and public outcry. If we use the term "oral" to distinguish the two, the legal feature is "oral" rather than "oral", and the moral feature is not only "oral" but also "oral". Only when morality is implemented in people's minds can it be transformed into the conscious practice of moral subjects.
In the implementation of popular support, even if the people are "convinced", the moral construction promoted by the government is also facing serious difficulties due to the following factors: First, the contradiction between monism and pluralism. The government-led morality is monistic, which is determined by the monism of its ideology and the subordinate nature of moral education to political education. Social morality is pluralistic, not only the existence of social mass morality is pluralistic, but also its moral ideals and values as far as the diversified social structure itself is concerned; Second, the contradiction between variability and consistency. Politics is the concentrated expression of economy and the embodiment of interests. Politics is changeable, but morality is a relatively stable system of values and norms. Not only morality, but also the academic field. Under the condition of emphasizing that academics and morality serve politics, academics and morality change around political fluctuations, which not only loses their independence, but also makes their legitimacy and reliability questioned. In the field of morality, every anti-tradition and subversion of social values will inevitably lead to the destruction and deconstruction of morality itself if a complete set of new values and new morality are not established at the same time; Third, the contradiction between one party's initiative and multiple initiatives. In the model of government-driven moral construction, the government is an active promoter of moral construction, and all sectors of society participate together under this impetus. Under the folk (or social) promotion mode, all social parties are active promoters of moral construction. The social parties mentioned here refer to the social education system, religious groups, social groups, mass media and so on. In the current social power structure, government power is too concentrated, and the role of social forces is limited. This reality has also caused people's psychological expectation of relying on government intervention. In the long run, it is a bright direction of moral construction to attribute social affairs to society, to attribute social power to society, to develop self-improvement and self-construction of society itself, and to reduce the dependence of social affairs on the government. Fourth, the contradiction between self-cultivation and governing the country. In the moral education promoted by the government, the moral level and moral image of the government and its personnel who hold public power will inevitably play a direct demonstration role for the educational objects. In fact, the government itself is not and does not need to be the embodiment of morality, and the operator of public power is only a part of the whole society. They are not selected through moral screening and purification, and because they hold public power in their hands, there is always the danger of using public power for personal gain. However, if even the government and its members lack morality, or ignore the moral norms and values advocated by them, what is the persuasiveness of this morality?
Let's discuss the undertaker of the role of educator from the perspective of generations. Caring for the next generation, caring for the moral education of the next generation and educating the next generation have become the mantra of the older generation or the older generation. The meaning of this spoken language is very rich. It not only shows that the previous generation (or two or even three generations, I won't go into details) has an obligation to educate the next generation (or two or three generations, the same as above), but also a right and qualification, and the previous generation has the right or qualification to educate the next generation. As the latter, it is an authoritative discourse in the field of moral education. This authoritative discourse ignores such an important question: where does the authority of this authoritative discourse come from? Why do the older generation have the natural qualifications to educate the next generation? The answer comes from two aspects: moral education and humanistic education by extension are not the same as knowledge education, and cannot be educated and improved by the next generation itself; If the next generation can't realize moral self-education, then the social role of the older generation will make them assume the responsibility of educating the next generation. However, moral education and knowledge education have the same premise, that is, there is a gap between morality and knowledge: to be a prophet, to know later and to feel later. In the field of knowledge, there is also a phenomenon that the next generation becomes a prophet to educate the previous generation, such as computers and networks, which is also a phenomenon that people often say is "post-education". In moral education, the difference in status should be manifested in that moral people educate immoral people (using the word immoral in a non-derogatory sense). But what still embarrasses us is: Is there such a difference between today's educators and educated people from the perspective of generations rather than individuals (from the personal point of view, we can undoubtedly find many Mr. Lotus who are out of the mud but not stained)? It is an obvious fact that the corruption of traditional social morality in China began with a generation that has reached the age of "veneration". Although this result is caused by the political movement that determines the moral status of one or two generations, there is no question of investigating individual moral responsibility, but what is important here is whether the older generation or two generations have such qualifications in the difference of moral positions when educating the next generation. Now we often hear a sentence: "The moral quality of young people is getting worse and worse!" This often makes me wonder, is the moral quality of young people now worse than that of those who were playing tricks on people, hitting people, destroying people and treating people as people? Relatively speaking, contemporary young people only pay more attention to themselves, emphasize self-choice and pursue personal happiness. If it is said that they pay attention to themselves and ignore others, emphasize self-choice and ignore social needs, and emphasize personal happiness and neglect their contribution to society, it is a moral problem of this generation of young people (though not necessarily so), then the previous generation has formed a deep-rooted concept of governing the country in their struggle (try to find a social group that is not troubled by the interest competition scandal): lack of mutual trust, small group interests (gangs), non-cooperation, personal harmony. What happened to the squid? Is it awkward to say that it is a teacher? /P & gt；
In the observation and reflection of moral corruption in today's society, we can't help asking: didn't this generation firmly grasp the power and lifeline of this society, which decided the moral situation of today's society? What consequences can we expect from educating the next generation from a generation with poor moral conditions? When the old citizens who keep saying "care about the next generation" and master social power are "holding the next generation in their arms", when the moralists, educators and public officials who keep saying "collectivism" and "patriotism" are actually practicing the utilitarian philosophy of abusing public interests and abusing power for personal gain, and this situation has become a popular social atmosphere, we educators hiding in the study.
At present, the corruption in China society is not the corruption of a person or a group, but the corruption of the whole people after a long illness. Of course, we can't lose confidence in moral construction and deny the significance of civic moral education. On the contrary, we can see the importance of civic moral education. Civic moral education is carried out under the background of comprehensive moral problems in society and its members, and this kind of education must also be aimed at all citizens.
Fourth, the dilemma of moral authority.
The function of morality is played by the combination of self-discipline and heteronomy. China's traditional morality is based on Confucius and Mencius' theory of Confucian goodness. Although the theory of goodness of human nature provides a basis for moral possibility based on its innate goodness of human nature, and demonstrates that it is a moral necessity to experience the evil of the world in the afterlife, it is one-sided because it believes too much that human nature can be perfected through morality. In practice, Confucianism takes the combination of etiquette and law as a supplement to the cultivation of human nature in heteronomy. In contemporary society, moral self-discipline is realized by cultivating moral sentiment (this process is not easy, and the difficulties involved have been fully discussed above). However, in a society with loose morality, weak public opinion and weak social forces, how can moral heteronomy be realized? The next question is, how to establish moral authority? Morality has no authority, just like a dead letter in law, it has no effect at all.
Why has morality lost its effectiveness and authority? First, the moral field has not been separated from political intervention and has become a public field, and the power to solve problems in this field has not been given to society. Second, the mechanism of public opinion supervision and democratic supervision in which moral heteronomy plays a role is still far from perfect. This mechanism cannot be formed until the basic elements of social democracy, such as freedom of the press and freedom of personal speech and expression, endowed by the Constitution are established and put into practice. Taking CCTV's famous column Focus Interview as an example, the monitoring function of its report lies not in CCTV's ratings, in other words, not in how many people know it, but in the attention of senior government leaders. Supervision by public opinion can't solve the problem by itself, but only by combining with government forces or social forces can it play a role. Third, just as in social practice, equality before the law (although it should be adhered to in principles and beliefs) is a nonsense that fools will believe in judicial practice. In moral practice, equality before morality is unimaginable. The combination of moral corruption and power is the cover of moral corruption, which makes morality increasingly pale. From the above three aspects, we can draw a conclusion that although the moral field is a relatively independent social and cultural subsystem, it is by no means an island. If morality wants to have real power, play a positive role in social development and make a developing society have a bright future, it must provide a relatively good political and social environment for moral construction. At the same time of the rapid development of the current economic system reform, we should reform the political system and social operation mechanism accordingly, and earnestly strengthen the construction of democracy and legal system in the modern sense and internationally recognized sense, so that China in the 2 1 century can make a difference in the two goals and scale of economic development and social civilization progress, and also bring a rich, healthy and civilized society.
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A morally mature society is made up of morally mature people, although the correctness of this thinking itself can be questioned. However, there seems to be no doubt that people with immature morality do harm to society within the scope of experience. Civic moral education can improve citizens' quality, establish social ethical and moral order, and cultivate citizens with sound morality. No matter from reducing crime, reducing moral anomie, or from building a civilized modern society, it will play a positive role in realizing the synchronous and coordinated development of economic development and social civilization. At the same time, this is undoubtedly the blessing of the whole people. However, people engaged in civic moral education should also understand that we are engaged in a very arduous task: we are trying to achieve the goal of educating and perfecting citizens' morality as a citizen under the condition that all aspects are immature and imperfect. In the above predicament, the necessity of civic moral education is more prominent. Faced with these difficulties, the solution is not to stop civic moral education because of choking on food, but to open the way for civic moral education and solve its internal and external problems. Civic moral education is imperative and has to be carried out, but at the same time it is carried out in the above predicament, so such civic moral education has to have defects: the citizens it cultivates are not the subjects of rights, but the subjects of obligations, and the result of training may be beneficial to the management of citizens by state power institutions rather than the self-management of citizens, that is, to "herders" rather than democracy. When the universal validity of morality has not been guaranteed by society, will civic moral education become a kind of knowledge that simply binds the people, like Neo-Confucianism in the Southern Song Dynasty, without binding force? Who can guarantee that history will not repeat itself? I hope the above concerns are unfounded!
This article is long enough, and students in our school can extract some at will! Such an examination class will never fail us! ? If you fail six courses, you won't have a degree certificate. There are not enough places to take the exam. If the inspection class fails us, then go hard with the teacher.