The Confucian Ideal Of Ching-Shih And Citizenship Education

The purpose of Citizenship education is to make our citizens own necessary knowledge, ability, attitude and value, to promote civic quality and to shape qualified citizens. Citizenship education emerged in the west for hundreds of years, so the west has rich experience in citizenship education. In our country, the school education in the Republic of China era has been permeated with the practice of citizenship education. In recent years, with the promulgation and implementation of the citizen morals construction implement outline, the citizenship education of our country got its new development opportunity. Citizenship education has become the most important theme in the education field of Contemporary China. The implementation of citizenship education is not only helpful to improve the quality of the citizens but also helpful to maintain social stability. Of course, we should soberly realize that, the change and transition of society inevitably bring about many problems for the citizenship education. Weak consciousness and ability of Citizen Participation have become an indisputable fact. The citizenship education is an irresistible trend.Self-cultivation and Ching-shih are just like two wheels of bicycle or a pair of wings. They are two central ideas of Confucian Thought. The ethical basis and political participation awareness of Confucian Ching-shih thought could provide important ideological resources for citizenship education. But in the existing study of the citizenship education, Confucian Ching-shih thought has not got sufficient attention undoubtedly. The paper attempts to explore the the modem value of Confucian Ching-shih thought through the analyses of connotation of Confucian Ching-shih thought, and integrate the citizenship education and the Confucian Ching-shih thought.The main body of this article contains four parts.The introduction introduces the research background, study methods and the core concepts based on the research topic of Citizenship Education. The first part states the background of ching-shih thought, and then analyzes the connotation in detail. Analyses of current situation about citizenship education are described. This part explains why the Confucian ideal of ching-shih is necessary and the resource can get from the Confucian ideal of ching-shih. The connotation of the Confucian ideal of ching-shih includes six parts, the spirit of joining world, virtue ethics-social social oriented ethics, critical spirit, patriotism, practical orientation and political participation. The second part analyzes the weak links of citizenship education in our country, that is to say, the citizens are lack of political participation ability and consciousness, and points out that the Confucian ideal of ching-shih is valuable to the citizenship education. What’s more, it discusses the possibility of Confucian ideal of ching-shih integrating into citizenship education. The third part discusses the path to integrating the Confucian Cing-shih thought into citizenship education:to integrate an ethics of social oriented ethics-virtue ethics into the ethics basic of citizenship education; to emphasize political participation awareness, knowledge and ability as the core of citizenship education; to make practical-pragmatic orientation as the value of citizenship education practice.