After Socrates was tried and sentenced to death, Plato completely despaired of the political system at that time, so he began to go to Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Egypt, cyrenaica and other places to seek knowledge. In about 387 BC, at the age of 40, he returned to Athens and founded his own school, the famous Plato Institute, in the northwest corner outside Athens. This college became one of the earliest institutions of higher learning in the history of western civilization, and it was also the origin of later institutions of higher learning.
In Plato's representative work "Republic", he not only systematically expounded his philosophy and political thoughts, but also discussed education in detail, and put forward a relatively complete educational theory system, which became one of the important sources of western educational thoughts and occupied an important position in the history of educational development.
Plato put forward a very famous one in the Republic? Cave theory? It is about a group of prisoners who have been bound in caves since childhood, with their backs to the bonfire and their heads and necks facing a wall. They can only see the projection on the wall. They think that the projection on the wall is reality itself. Suddenly, one of them broke free and walked freely, and saw the situation of the prisoners clearly, and understood that what everyone had seen before was only a false and ignorant illusion. The man went outside the cave, saw the sun (Plato's metaphor found the truth), understood the beauty of the outside world, and thought of going back to the cave to save his compatriots.
In Plato's view, education should be the most essential resource of human society, cultivating people who have walked out of caves, seen the sunshine and hoped to lead other prisoners out of caves. So, how to cultivate such people? Plato put it forward? Seven arts of freedom? The educational thought of.
So-called? Seven arts of freedom? (? Free newspaper? ), the original meaning refers to the knowledge that a free man should have and the seven subjects that he should study, which is the seven humanities subjects relative to the professional, vocational and technical courses.
Plato followed at first? Exercise your body with gymnastics and cultivate your mind with music? Principles, disciplines are divided into two categories: primary and advanced. Primary subjects include games, several sports, music and dance in a narrow sense, and cultural subjects such as reading, writing and arithmetic. Advanced subjects mainly include arithmetic, geometry, music theory and astronomy. Plato thinks that these subjects are for training students' intelligence, not for practical application.
By the early Middle Ages in Europe, Plato's? Seven arts of freedom? At school, it has developed into seven courses: grammar (including Latin and literature), rhetoric (including prose and poetry writing and history), logic (formal logic), arithmetic, geometry (including geography), astronomy and music. These are also the core contents of university education before the early industrial revolution, which is the predecessor of liberal arts today.
The phrase Liberal arts focuses on liberal, which has a clear connotation and extension in English, but it is difficult to translate it clearly in Chinese. We can illustrate it through an application in American politics.
In America, if a politician is a liberal, it means that he/she must be a Democrat. He/she generally advocates a lot of control over business, implementing welfare policies, supporting tolerance of race and belief, supporting multicultural policies and equal rights bills. Its political ideas tend to give welfare to the poor, and the government operates various welfare projects.
The opposite of liberalism is conservatism, that is, conservatism. The conservative political idea is to oppose centralization and emphasize decentralization, local autonomy and protection of private property. Advocating traditionalism, claiming that the small family is the axis of human civilization, and advocating that every citizen should manage himself. As long as he works hard, society will naturally be more harmonious.
It can be seen that the word liberal is more like a symbol of elite consciousness. Elite education under Plato's educational thought is to cultivate people who can change society and create a new social, political and cultural order. The nine oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States have basically followed and popularized this educational concept. The education of cultivating this kind of social elite has been completed by this kind of university called the College of Arts and Sciences for a long period of history.
? College of arts and sciences? How to translate it into Chinese has always been a difficult problem. Translated into? Free art college? 、? School of Humanities? 、? General college? 、? Boya College? Wait, it's hard to be vivid. What have been gradually accepted by people in recent years? College of arts and sciences? This Chinese translation can only be considered relatively close.
The general education implemented by liberal arts colleges embodies the essence of American university education. The goal of general education is to cultivate students' four abilities: effective thinking ability, ideological communication ability, proper judgment ability and value discrimination ability. (See Harvard Red Book on General Education in a Free Society. )
Effective thinking ability refers to developing logical thinking and gaining insight into the relationship between things by studying natural science. By studying literature subjects such as history, politics, psychology and anthropology, we can cultivate our associative ability.
The ability to communicate ideas means not only learning to talk with people, but also learning grammar, rhetoric, writing skills and oral presentation skills, so that people can become persuasive and convey their ideas carefully, logically and effectively. This ability is considered necessary for a leader in the west, because the essence of leadership is to influence others.
The ability to make appropriate judgments refers more to the ability to practice, that is, the ability to solve problems by using what you have learned. It is not the ultimate goal of education to only emphasize the memory of knowledge and make the brain a powerful hard disk. Just like keeping the art of war in your head, it's useless not to use it in war.
Value discrimination refers to the ability to make choices after integrating everyone's outlook on life, world outlook and values. What is right, what is wrong, what is fair and so on. If you don't have public opinion on these issues in your mind, you can't be a leader.
In other words, an excellent elite should not only master natural science, but also have logical thinking ability, communication ability, practical ability and, most importantly, value discrimination ability. The cultivation of these four abilities is the core of western education and American education, so where is the essence of American education?
In the final analysis, the essence of American education is to follow and carry forward the humanistic spirit that began in ancient Greece and Rome. You know, the origin of American universities is not business schools, engineering schools or medical schools, but liberal arts schools. Even in the 1970s when American universities entered the modernization stage, the vision of university education has been summarized as? Education, scientific research and service? However, the vast majority of undergraduates in American private universities are still trained in liberal arts colleges, and so are a few public universities.
Looking back at the history of higher education in China, Tsinghua University was a preparatory school for studying in the United States, which was built by the Qing government with part of boxer indemnity returned by the United States, with the purpose of sending students to the United States to study the most advanced science and technology. That is to say, from the first batch of international students in China, their purpose of studying abroad is to learn advanced scientific and technological knowledge in the West, but they fail to realize that the essence of American education is actually general education.
Over the past 100 years, advanced scientific knowledge has been brought back, but why didn't China completely realize the transformation of social modernization like western countries? This is worth thinking about. China? After 90? , is the hope of China's future political and cultural rise. Those students who study in the west can only learn the humanities such as history, politics, ideology and culture, learn the essence of western civilization, and work towards the elite, instead of just being craftsmen, in order to become the real hope for the future development of China.