Reseach On Dong Zhongshu’s Moral Education Thoughts

Traditional moral education thought in China has been with Confucianism as the mainstream for a long time. It not only represents lots of human’s common rules of life, but also includes human’s basic wisdom and emotion. The quality of human thought is the important reason and the impetus of the formation of human character. It not only plays an objective role in human behavior, but also the impact on human intelligence. Humans belong to the society, and they launch and guide various kinds of social movements. After being influenced by good moralities, people can have lofty sentiment. After being taught moral characters, people can gain advanced thinking. Humans can promote the progress of the society through enriching their spirit. Good ideology and morality can urge humans to gain tolerance, maturity of the ideal and good moral characters. Otherwise, humans won’t have any progress and lose their targets.Dong Zhongshu, a great statesman, ideologist and educator in Han Dynasty. He lived at around the time that the political situation was troublous. The Huns invaded and the lords vied for supremacy. At the same time, the peasant was uprising. The rulers need a cultural weapon to arm themselves and to get the support of the people. In order to meet the needs of the rulers, Dong Zhongshu put forward his idea of moral education. He took over and mixed the human nature view of the great ideologists in the pre-Qin period, especially from Confucius’, Mencius’ and Xun Zi’s thoughts. And finally, he formed his own theory of human nature. He divided people into three classes according to his human nature theory, that is, the nature of "saint", "the nature of common people" and "the nature of narrow mindedness". He thought that "sex" itself is pristine nature, and human nature has both good ingredients, and evil ones. Only after the king’s enlightenment, people can remove the potential evil in human nature and then become real virtuous. For Dong Zhongshu, his moral education ideas are basic on his theory of human nature.The main contents of Dong Zhongshu’s moral education thoughts are "the Three Cardinal Guides" thought, the Five Constant Virtues, moral codes and music education thoughts. " the Three Cardinal Guides" means "ruler guides subject, father guides son and husband guides wife" and the Five Constant Virtues include benevolence, righteousness, propriety, knowledge and sincerity. They are a kind of social ethics code of ethics, which are also a vital means and the way to cultivate human’s self-cultivation. At the same time, he advocated moral codes and music education. He put The Four Books and the Five Classics as well as the Six Arts in the teaching materials. He though that moral codes and music education play a very important role in improving the personal moral cultivation and preserving the rise and fall of the nation. Dong Zhongshu expounded the benevolence and righteousness and the viewpoint of justice and benefits in his moral education thoughts, that is, "Be benevolent to others and be righteous to me", "Keep improving personal moral cultivation", "Be benevolence and wisdom", "Pay more attention to righteousness and less to benefit", "Have the right values and a strong will". And he put forward the main methods of moral education are as follows:the model demonstration method, the emotion molding method, the self-improvement method, the step-by-step method and rites and music education method. All the principles and methods of his moral education and moral cultivation are in the service of the ruling class, which can be a weapon to control the people in the thought by the ruling class. And finally the ruling class can achieve the purpose of maintaining their own right and interests with these thoughts. However, some of them can reflect the life criteria of human society carry forward the national moral tradition and discuss the characteristics of the education law.Dong Zhongshu made the moral education as the basic means of moral politics, which was adapt to the demand of historical development. It made the class contradictions soften to a certain extent and promoted the progress of the feudal society. However, with the development of the society, it gradually became a false preach, which not only imprisoned people’s minds, but also hindered the progress of the society. Through two aspects of positive and negative effect of Dong Zhongshu’s moral education thoughts, it’s seen that it had a profound influence on the Chinese traditional society.Finally, standing the perspective of the times, aiming at the mental state and facing the crisis of social stability, we review the viewpoint on the moral education thoughts of Dong Zhongshu. We can derive inspiration and guidance:We should vigorously promote and popularize moral education in order to promote the construction of harmonious society; We should strengthen the construction of basic education and cultivate talents in both ability and integrity; We should Enhance the proportion of personal morals in selecting talents; We should set up a sound system of moral behavior protection and moral evaluation so as to purify the social atmosphere; We should use morals to lead the development of politics, economy, culture in order to promote the stability and prosperity of the country. In the future, when we use Dong Zhongshu’s moral education thoughts for reference, we should keep the good and discard the dregs, and maintain the development and inheritance of the excellent traditional morals.