※What is life education?
Whether it is Chinese "life education" or English "life education", it can be said that it is quite a new concept. Therefore, not only the understanding of this concept in Europe and the United States is quite different, but also the domestic promoters’ concept. In the interpretation, there has not been sufficient discussion and consensus.
Life education at home and abroad has different focuses on specific issues, but the fundamental solution to these problems is interoperability. The LEC (life educational center) in Sydney, Australia believes that to keep children away from drugs, we must give them a positive and positive starting point for life; Taiwanese society is equally affirmed from the standpoint of anti-violence or suicide prevention. The real suppression of anti-life behaviors does not lie in the establishment of anti-blocking, monitoring, crime-fighting or notification systems, but in the fundamental prevention. The way to prevent problems is to establish a positive value on life and mutual help and mutual love in the family society.
In this way, true life education should start from the family, school, and society, helping young people to explore and understand the meaning of life, respect and cherish the value of life, love and develop each person's unique life, and their own lives. A beautiful communion is established between the heavens and the earth.
※Conclusion of life education
Life education should help students explore and understand the meaning of life, respect and cherish the value of life, love and develop a unique life, practice and live a harmonious relationship between the world and the people. If we follow this goal, the connotation of life education should cover three areas: (1) life and religious philosophy, (2) basic and applied ethics, and (3) personality integration and emotional education.
(1) Philosophy of life and religion
The core issue of philosophy of life is the so-called ultimate concern, that is, the settlement of the meaning of life, the establishment of ideals of life. In the face of such impermanent life, people have to ask: What is the meaning of life? Where is the goal of life? What kind of goals and ideals can have an eternal meaning beyond impermanence? This type of problem that affects everyone most deeply can be said to be the ultimate issue of life education.
Life is not just about eating, managing money, and men and women. It is not only issues such as reunification, politics, and technology islands that are worthy of care. As the spirit of all things, as a religious scholar such as Karl Rahner, the so-called "existence of questioning" is not only an economic animal that pursues practical utilitarianism, but also seeks meaning and ideal. The starting point and return of life. People question and be eager for answers to themselves and everything around them.
Finally, the importance of philosophy of life and religious philosophy can also be understood from the relationship between the outlook on life and the attitude of practice. The question of life meaning and the question of practice are mutually exclusive. One is the ultimate belief in the form, and the other is the practical principle under the shape. In fact, anyone's behavioral practice ultimately reflects his ultimate belief, and must be based on his ultimate belief. ... In short, ... the lack of a clear and profound outlook on life makes it difficult to establish clear and profound values.
(2) Basic and Applied Ethics
The second academic field involved in life education is ethics or moral philosophy, and ethics is concerned with how people should live. This simple explanation on the one hand tells the importance of ethics in practice, and on the other hand it also carries danger. It is easy to evoke a plausible prejudice, that is, to regard ethics as a life standard for sweeping in and out, or a trilogy of "three characters", "discipline", "four-dimensional eight virtues" and so on.
"Goodness" may be embedded in traditional wisdom, and people need not be afraid to be labeled with "conservative" to adhere to it; "goodness" may also require people to deconstruct the existing "open" attitude in the new era. Order to reconstruct new value standards. Obviously, the two questions of "what is good" and "how to choose good" are the lessons that people can't avoid when they settle down. These two lessons are the most fundamental issues of ethics.
Therefore, the ethical or moral education of Taiwan's school education needs to be improved in two aspects. First, ethics or ethics should avoid political correctness or an eight-part form. Secondly, most of the current ethical education in schools is only moral education, life education or normative education that requires students to obey, but lacks the ethical education that inspires students to think carefully. Ideological education should teach children not only the "ethics" of ethics, but also let the children understand "so". I only know that the education that I do not know is that it only teaches people to use "ritual" but does not teach "rational" education. Such education is at best "teaching" rather than "reasoning." It is of course difficult to preach the students to be convinced, not to mention helping students to internalize their values.
Ethics cares about how people should live and explore issues such as "what is good" and "how to choose good". Roughly speaking, "what is good" is a subject of basic ethics, and "how to choose good" is the object of applied ethics. The former is the basis of the latter, the latter is the use of the former, and the two are mutually useful. What is basic ethics? To put it simply, before discussing specific ethical issues such as "can you say goodwill lies", "can you have premarital sex", "whether you can borrow a license, and collect commissions", you must first discuss the question "why can or can't"; To grasp "why can or can't", we must first grasp the essence of right and wrong. According to this, the object of basic ethics is not the specific problem of "how to choose good", but the ideological structure necessary to solve such specific problems. Basic ethics hopes to explore the meaning of good and evil through rational thinking and human experience, and to construct a methodological theory that carries out moral judgment and proves moral principles.
Applied ethics is the specific application of basic ethics in various practical fields, and the scope is all-encompassing. All the choices related to human practice, as long as they involve good and evil, righteousness and justice, belong to the object of applied ethics. In recent decades, the application of ethics in different fields of practice has sprung up. For example, related to personal practice are "two gender ethics", "marriage and family ethics", "life and medical ethics", "work and leisure ethics", "sports ethics" and "animal ethics"; There are "economic ethics", "business ethics", "political ethics", "legal ethics", "media ethics" and "environmental ethics" related to the realm of "public and righteousness".
(3) Personality and emotional education
Most of the time, even without special ethics training, people will still know what is morally or should not be done without thinking. For example, if the cashier at a convenience store finds more money and does not find it, what should I do? It's very simple. If you don't want to be greedy for money, if you don't belong to yourself, you should return it to him. However, knowing that, in many cases, the relationship between what is done and what he knows is deviated from each other. This is the question of "inconsistent knowledge or behavior" or inconsistent personality. "Inconsistent knowledge and understanding" is one of the most serious moral issues, and it is also a serious issue that any moral education can't face. To circumvent this subject, moral education will only instill the moral knowledge, and it will run counter to the goal of moral education.
The deep reason why personality is not integrated is that morality is not internalized and becomes the absolute insistence in life. There is no persistence, and naturally it is impossible to talk about the impetus for implementing practice. The question is, why is morality not internalized? In the previous literary view of life, it has been initially pointed out that morality and outlook on life are closely related. What a person thinks about the meaning and vision of life will determine who he is or will be. Why do contractors cut corners? Why do civil servants get kickbacks? It's not because they don't know how to be immoral, but because they want to make more money than they want to cover the house. The question is: Why do they want to make more money than to want to cover the house? The answer is probably because making money is spent on his own, and the house is someone else who lives, and the death is the death of others. Why do they want to make money so much that they don’t take the lives of others? Because in a society where laughter is not smiling, money is a symbol of all status and power; only by accumulating wealth can you gain status and power. But why should they pursue status and power? This is because they believe that with status and power, there is real happiness, which guarantees a successful life. The question is, can identity, status, wealth and power really guarantee a happy and successful life? This question is worth pondering and thinking, and the answer may not be taken for granted.
In addition to the problem of the unconformity of the outlook on life and moral values, the second important source of knowing that it cannot be done is the depression of emotional intelligence, that is, the unification of emotion and reason. The former is that although I know that morality requires people to "not be greedy for the sake of money," my outlook on life is based on the principle of accumulated wealth. Under this circumstance, moral requirements and my outlook on life are in conflict with each other, and certainly cannot be internalized as an attitude of life. As for the unification of emotion and reason, it is said that although my outlook on life and morality do not conflict, even it requires me to do things that are ethical. However, "the heart is longing for" does not necessarily mean that it can "do not exceed the circumstances".
Obviously, to make the combination of knowledge and action, the integration of personality and emotion is a work that cannot be ignored. The first step in the integration is to develop a self-conscious habit. If people can't be self-conscious, they will easily react directly to the current situation. The result is often irritating and choosing not to go through the brain.
Second, the cultivation of empathy is also very important. People often look at the world and see others from their limited experience. But unless you can really pick up your own glasses and look at the problem from the perspective of others, "you can never build a deep and sincere relationship with others."
※Implementation of life education in schools
From the interpretation of the connotation of life education in the last section, we can find that it is both knowledgeable and effective. Among them, the subject of life, religion and moral philosophy has many rich and important intellectual connotations, waiting for people to explore and reflect. Of course, the significance of these issues is not just intellectual. They also have deep practical implications, which are closely related to what kind of person a person will become and what choices to make. As for personality integration and emotional education, it is more practical, but the details of it also contain many intellectual topics, which need to be clarified to inspire the conscious and hard work.
The discussion above shows that the implementation of life education in school education should probably include three aspects: "deepening the outlook on life", "internalizing values" and "integrating informed intentions". In addition, we can add an environment of "respect for multiple intelligences" to help students understand in a subtle way that each person's unique "to be" is far more than the "to have" of external wealth status. The importance of coming, the following simple list of four dimensions of life education:
(1) Deepening the outlook on life, belonging to the field of philosophy of life and religion
1. Exploring the meaning, goals and ideals of life. This part of the topic can be called the ultimate concern. School education should not only implement the "smart and beautiful body beauty", but the "intelligence" here should not be just the "knowledge" of knowledge and skills, but also the profound wisdom of life. The overall goal of education should not be to help children find a job or career in the future, but also to teach them the meaning of life, the pursuit of life's ideals, and outline their life vision.
2. Life and death education, death education, tranquil care and hospice care. Life and death are two sides of one body. The meaning of life and death is invented by each other. If a person cannot live without regret, he cannot die without regrets. Similarly, if a person cannot settle and surpass the haze of death, it is difficult to establish the meaning of life.
(2) Internalization values belong to the category of ethics and ethical ideological education
1. Cultivate mature moral thinking and judgment.
2. Ethical and ideological education based on moral philosophy can truly justify and not teach, and cultivate the ability of children to think carefully about the "choosing good".
3. Cultivating multiple values: the ability to understand the same ethical issue from different angles
4. Familiar with the thinking methods of "basic ethics" and different topics of "applied ethics", such as bioethics, gender ethics, workplace ethics, family and campus ethics, and social and political ethics.
(3) Informed and integrated, belonging to the fields of ethical (life) education, moral education, emotional education and personality integration
1. Help students to integrate the value concept of internalization in intellectuality into the personality (sincerely in the middle), and live on the choice of practice (formed outside).
2. Enhance students' emotional intelligence, conversation and listening skills.
3. Develop students' ability to deal with anger, greed and lust.
(4) Respect for multiple wisdoms and potentials
1. Everyone has a variety of different wisdoms: The theory of multiple wisdom once again gives deep meaning to "fitness education", which is to respect individual differences of students. Since everyone's mind is made up of different intensities of wisdom, everyone has a unique way of knowing the world. Schools should help children understand and develop their unique wisdom.
2. Schools should develop a diverse learning environment so that each student can see his or her own opportunities and make all kinds of wisdom active.
3. Each kind of wisdom has a multi-faceted performance. Therefore, schools should also develop a diversified teaching, learning, and evaluation pipeline to enable children to learn happily and effectively in a confident environment.
For the sake of the post, school education in the 21st century should be based on "people" and devoted to life education of "deepening the outlook on life", "internalizing values", "integrating informed intentions" and "respecting multiple intelligences". Furthermore, this kind of education about life wisdom and life practice should not only be an indispensable part of school education, but also a lifelong education about the quality of life of people from family to workplace.
——Excerpted from Sun Xiaozhi’s Connotation and Implementation of Life Education