The Study On The Construction Of College Students’ Filial Piety

Filial piety is one of the important ethical norms in traditional Chinese society, and filial piety is the most important of all virtues. In the period of May 4th New Culture Movement, filial piety met with severe criticisms since it is treated as an important factor of strangling human nature and hindering social progress.During the course of moral reconstruction since 20 th century,people re-evaluated filial piety. Some scholars advocated traditional filial piety should be viewed as important contents of moral construction of contemporary citizens. However, social structure and attachment to the family of contemporary China has changed dramatically. Whether contemporary college students acknowledge fealty and how they understand and reconstruct filial piety has become the emphasis of our study. We make an in-depth study on the connotation of college students’ fealty and the process they construct the filial piety. We have found that the connotation of contemporary filial piety includes care for parents, diversified obedience, honor and respect, honoring parents and consideration for pension mode. The process of fealty construction can be divided into 3 stages,which are sprout of filial piety, development of filial piety and self-consciousness of it.filial piety is natural gratefulness between children and parents in the childhood. The behavior of parents’ filial piety set a good example for their children. During the growing process of an individual, effected by the change of relationship between interviewee and their parents and other social factors, concept of fealty tends to develop discrepantly. Most interviewees continuously accumulate their affections with their parents, as a result, strongly emotion-responsive type of fealty is constructed. Few interviewees’ affection with their parents stagnate or even break, thus their concept of filial piety put much more emphasis on children’s obligations to support their parents.Love is the key word of the contemporary construction of filial piety, which has a shared emotional basis with traditional filial piety. But the traditional filial piety put emphasis on the obedience to parents’ authority, while contemporary filial piety highlights individual’s subjectivity. It is me who is willing to construct the concept of filial piety not under external pressure. Meanwhile, on the topic of supporting parents, interviewee still holds the opinion that it is their obligation to support their parents, which is in conformity with traditional filial piety. Besides, interviewee consider that public policy and old-age service system should make contributions to parents’ pension, which is different from traditional filial piety. So we can figure out that on one hand, interviewees’ construction of filial pietyis result of parent-children interactions; on the other hand, it is the result of individual-society interactions. Construction of filial piety changes with individual’s growth and the changes of interactive situation. Contemporary college students’ understanding of filial piety presents individual differences, while far different from traditional filial piety in general. Calling for filial piety in moral construction of contemporary China, we should not only base on the tradition but also take contemporary human’s real situation into consideration.