A Study On Inspirational Education To College Students In The Period Of Social Transformation

In the key period of social transformation in the21st century, China is in a great era: economic globalization has brought about political, economic and cultural changes; pluralism in ideologies and values influences the ideas in college education and college students'development; deviation in college inspirational education results in problems in moral regulation, spiritual pursuit and social values. Therefore, it is an important topic to investigate how to inspire college students to success, or how to improve their overall quality (personality, morality, belief, etc.) when they learn knowledge in colleges. Guided by Marxism, historical materialism and dialectical materialism, adopting the methods of literature review, empirical and contrastive studies, focusing on the main line as well as the logic starting point of "ambition", this dissertation attempts to explore the implementation strategy and security system of inspirational education to college students in the period of social transformation. All conclusions are drawn based on analyzing the features of college students' life aspiration, on reviewing inspirational education theory and practice home and abroad, and on clarifying the basic concepts, theoretical orientation, goals and contents of inspirational education to college students. The purpose of this study is two-folded: in theory, to enrich the approaches and contents of ideological education to college students in the period of social transformation; in practice, to promote the efficient implementation of inspirational education and to provide intellectual impetus to college students' growth. The contents of the six chapters of this dissertation, apart from the introduction, are summarized as follows:Chapter One advances the theoretical framework of inspirational education to college students. The logic line of this study centers on:what kind of aspiration college students should cherish; how to encourage them to aspire; why it is necessary to aspire. For one thing, as a human-specific spiritual desire, the setting up and realization of ambition comes from the innermost, while they're influenced by circumstances, especially by education. The setting up of one's ambition depends on his self-awareness and internal needs, in which education and inspiration are indispensable. For another, strong perseverance is necessary for the realization of the aspiration. Directed by life goal, people regulate and control their ideas and behaviors in response to the need in socialization, so as to improve their mental ability and realize their goals. Based on defining the concepts, this chapter investigates the mechanism of inspirational education, namely, that of internal need, external reinforcement and value cognition. Further, this chapter frames the basic ideas of inspirational education to college students:to initiate rational self-consciousness, to guide spiritual self-discipline and to promote life harmony. It is held that the purpose of inspirational education is to help college students raise the quality of their life.Chapter Two probes into the theoretical basis of inspirational education to college students. The ideas from time-honored inspirational education, both home and abroad, are the theoretical basis of the points put forward in this dissertation. In ancient China, representative figures of various academic schools, such as Confucius and Mencius, elaborated their viewpoints on inspirational education:setting the life goal of being a "gentleman" or a "sage", so as to improve the personality in the process of tempering willpower. In spite of certain limitations, such ideas of inspirational education not only produced generations of loyal subjects for the country and dutiful children for the family, but also impelled lots of people with lofty ideas who showed great concerns to their motherland and tried to contribute a lot to the Chinese nation. In ancient Greece and other countries, lots of philosophers interpreted the connotations of the traditional virtues such as wisdom, brevity, temperance and justice, so as to expose social problems and apperceive the meaning of life. They advocated the ideas of "being people-oriented", centering on spiritual harmony and the pursuit of happiness and perfection, which becomes the treasures of world history and culture. Besides, this chapter reviews the classic theory of Marxist inspirational education, its innovation and development in China. Although Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did not use the term of "inspirational education", their classic theory included rich contents in this respect:they held the life philosophy indicating that "conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity", and such life transcendence makes it possible to practice inspirational education; they believed that "man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness", which, in the framework of teleology, is a biological and social basis for inspirational education; they argued that it was "labor" that distinguished man from animals and man's willpower was externalized in each link of the practice, in the form of products, which, in the framework of voluntarism, directed the path of realizing individual's will; they took "full and free development" as the fundamental goal of man's existence while education was the condition in achieving this goal, which is the core idea of Marxist educational philosophy. As far as the leadership in China is concerned, proceeding from the reality of the country, generations of state leaders have enriched and developed Marxist theory of inspirational education and constructed the theory with Chinese characteristics.Chapter Three centers on the references in related fields both home and abroad, discussing spiritual education in Germany and success science in the United States, the theory and practice of example education in China. Budding in late19th century, together with the development of science and technology in the industrialized society, the spiritual education in Germany reflected people's appeal for spiritual richness against the barren in the context of industrialization. Dozens of philosophers, educationalists who devoted to spiritual science research tried to interpret the value and meaning of life:Wilhelm Dilthey interpreted the significance of life, Rudorf Eucken elucidated the value of life, Theodor Litt pointed out the path to temperament cultivation. Despite the idealistic limitations, all of these theories played a positive part in helping adolescents understand life and its meaning so as to enhance its value. In United States, success science is also termed as ambition encouragement, which regards pursuit of success as a motive for realizing self-transcendence and promoting social progress. Actually, the ideas of the representative masters like Orison Marden, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, etc. have exerted far reaching influence on youth all over the world. According great importance to western values and life styles, success science mainly sets some material aspects like wealth as the criterion of success, thus it is featured with money worship and utilitarianism. However, as a socio-cultural phenomenon, success science mainly focuses on people's ideals and beliefs, and encourages people in their thinking and behaving. Setting an example and showing good personality through examples has been a time-honored and efficient approach in moral education in China. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, lots of examples such as Lei Feng, Zhang Haidi, Xu Benyu, etc. have been set up, all of whom have played an effective and positive role in encouraging college students to raise their self-demand levels, perfect their personality and realize their ideals. Though different views held in the ideological sphere in different countries have brought about different ideas and contents in personality development, in the research of inspirational education to college students, it is necessary to have an open view and rigorous scholarship.Chapter Four discusses current environments and the problems in the inspirational education to college students. As an important element in education, environments do influence the inspirational education to college students, especially in the period of social transformation featured with multi-dimension, complexity and openness. Based on parsing the economic, political and cultural environments and the features of mass media, together with the firsthand data from surveys implemented by scholars at home, this chapter analyzes the problems in the inspirational education to college students:since political ambition is a sort of representation of each individual, the feature of its pluralism challenges their political attitudes and beliefs; overall, a fairly good picture can be seen about college students'moral ambition, which reveals their expectation for their moral personality through their moral trait, ability and behavior, but weaknesses, such as the plurality in moral demands, deviation in moral behavior and evading from "loftiness", still exist; while they overemphasize individual value, there's still fuzziness in their understanding of the career goals so that they show obvious utilitarianism in choosing their professions; they have some bias in understanding what is good life and what is happiness, which reflects the variation of their values.Chapter Five focuses on the goals and contents of inspirational education to college students. As an important component in ideological and political education, inspirational education is closely connected with both the context of the social transformation period and the personal development of college students. Based on the problems discussed in the previous chapter, the vision of inspirational education to college students in the period of social transformation is proposed here:esteeming students'personal tradition and belief, respecting the variety of their personalities, promoting the elevation of their morality to the universal framework and that of their spirit to self-transcendence. Accordingly, the author of this dissertation is not so demanding as to require college students to set up life ambition at extremely high level. Instead, she presents the following proposals:the goal of inspirational education to college students is to achieve the healthy development of personality and mental realm; the contents include educations in their ideal and faith, their morality and belief, and their views on happiness. Within this framework, it is hoped that college students can uphold their values and beliefs, adopt active attitudes so that they won't get lost in their life, and at the same time they can raise their happiness index in the process of improving their ability to be happier, and can upgrade their life quality and realize their life values.Chapter Six offers suggestions on the implementation and guarantee of inspirational education to college students. It is held that such education is not only an activity for teachers and colleges to help students to pursuit and realize their life ambition, but also an activity for students themselves to develop their own spiritual world and life. To ensure the implementation, teachers, students and the environments in colleges are all fundamental. This chapter discusses how to implement and guarantee inspirational education to college students in three aspects:1) Value guidance is important. To be more exact, the ideological and political education is based on the understanding of the meaning of the society and life, and guided by the dominant ideology and mainstream values of the society. Students'abilities should be cultivated in value cogitation, value judgment and value selection, so that they can set up right life ambition and realize their life value. In the process of value-orientation, two principles should be adhered to:the integration of purposiveness and regularity of life; the integration of teachers'guidance and students' autonomy. At the same time, students'misconceptions about values should be clarified so as to benefit their development.2) The internalization of students'self-construction is a must. It is hoped that students, as the main parts of education, can achieve the internalization of education, through self-construction. In doing so, the prerequisite is knowing themselves better and accepting the dominant values; the approach is self-education and self-steeling. Only in this way can we expect to upgrade college students'spiritual pursuit.3) Environments in colleges need optimizing. The responsibility of the environment is to keep the balance of all social elements, so that individuals can survive various environments without being restricted by castes. Based on the discussion of Chapter Four, to achieve the goal of increasing the efficiency of education, this chapter further analyzes the effect of environment change in the period of social transformation on college environments and put forwards the idea of how to optimize them:guiding students in the right direction with socialist core value; enriching the spiritual core with Zeitgeist; cultivating students'self-consciousness and innovation as to form their wisdom and character.