Glimpse Of Heritage And Development Of The Qin Dynasty Confucianism In Contemporary Music Education

Confucianism maintains its everlasting vitality about 2500 years since it is founded by Confucius, which has a close connection with the Chinese traditional culture and can present Chinese unique spiritual properties through the whole history. Education is the most important part of practice to realize the Confucianism purpose. Specially, music education has experienced dozens of century's changes; meantime, its development is far-reaching impacted by Confucianism. This article, as a kind of teaching theories paper, discusses the different music education types coming from Confucian ideology and traditional music education. Thus some suggestions have been proposed to make an improvement in this area.This paper consists of four chapters. The first chapter reviews the long-standing Chinese culture and well-established Confucianism including the theories of Confucius, Mencius and Xun Zi since pre-Qin dynasty and their applications in modern music education. Besides, neo-Confucianism developed recently has more and more influence on both domestic and international culture.The second chapter sets the Confucian Thought as a standard in order to evaluate music courses. Three main points of music teaching are extracted from Confucianism and traditional music education, which are musical aesthetical standards in Confucian ideology, embodiment of primary value in music curriculum standards according to Confucianism and Confucian education in ethics.The third chapter shows the merging of Chinese Confucianism and western education. We compare the difference between them, and then indicate the appearance of Confucianism from westerners'view, otherwise, the way that Chinese education utilizes the merits in western Thoughts.The fourth chapter makes a reconsideration of the Confucianism's impact on music education. The first part explains the sayings in Confucian records such as"Instruction knows no class distinction","individualized teaching"and"to teach is to learn". The second part applies the traditional approach to elaborate on some ideas and instructions in Confucian music education.