The connotation of "spiritual adult" is to make a college student have the potential of "independent spirit and free thinking" at the beginning of undergraduate stage, and ask himself the ultimate proposition of "how to be a man" seriously and continuously.
In the summer of 2002, the University Humanities Reader, edited by the famous scholar Professor Xia, has been widely praised by the society since its publication. The media called it "filling a gap in college humanities education books".
Subsequently, East China Normal University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Suzhou University, Nanjing University, Jilin University and other universities listed "reading" as an elective course.
In order to meet the needs of teaching, actively respond to the growing pains of college students as "spiritual adults" and guide them to enter the "broad ideological screen" of "reading", in August 2003, Guangxi Normal University Press published "College Humanities Course" edited by Mr. Xia, which is more suitable for college classroom teaching.
A college student's college time from 18 to 22 years old is a unique "soul" development season in his life, and "spiritual nutrition" is particularly important.
Mr. Xia pointed out that universities in the modern sense were called "spiritual castles" when they rose from the European continent in the Middle Ages. However, in today's society and university campus, utilitarianism prevails, and "finding a decent job" after graduation has become the pursuit of many college students.
In a sense, some universities today have become "vocational training grounds", and some parents only care about their children's physical development and ignore their spiritual development.
Previously, some scholars wrote that our higher education did not endow the educated with civic literacy in the legal sense, moral bottom line in the ethical sense, moral feelings in the cultural sense and the ability to love in the spiritual sense. In other words, what our higher education lacks is the cultivation of humanistic quality. It's just that we have been ignoring or afraid to face up to this deficiency in practice.