Metaphor In High School Moral Education

Metaphor is of great value and significance for education, which has been widely recognized among academic circle. How should we examine the moral education implemented in current middle schools in a metaphorical way of thinking and by adopting the strategy of metaphor, this is a problem deserving of more attention and studies. At present, under the rule of the rationalist thinking, moral education in middle school excessively emphasizes the inculcation of rational knowledge, excludes irrational factors, and neglects the cultivation of students’ beautiful soul, which, to some extent, will cause the gradual decline of moral education in middle schools. In view of this situation, the paper, combining the traditional poetic moral education in China, based on the literature view of metaphor research in western countries, puts forward the point of view that metaphorical thinking should be attached great importance in middle school moral education.The paper explains briefly the concept of metaphor from different perspectives, aiming to make clear that it is studied from philosophical perspective. Metaphor is a process characterized by finding the similarity between different things through analogy and association; it essentially indicates the process of adopting one thing to learn, understand, and express another thing. Different from rational thinking, metaphorical thinking discovers not the thinking process from phenomenon to essence, but that from one object to another, from presence to absence instead. Different subjects have different understandings towards metaphor under different context. The potential power of metaphor could bring moral effect by osmosis; the poetic imagery of metaphor could accommodate the goodness and beauty. By corresponding with traditional poetic moral education in China, it could effectively overcome defects existing in rationalist moral education. While the academic community has long been studying the values of metaphor for moral education, but in the implementation of moral education in middle schools, metaphor has not been well developed and practiced. Examining the mainstream conversational moral education in current middle school education in metaphorical thinking, it could be seen that it lacks enough openness and generation both in form and in content. Meanwhile, the influence that some potential metaphorical symbols in campus environment such as language, architecture may have on the shaping of students’moral character has not been paid enough attention either. Among those problems, the most important one is that metaphor hasn’t displayed its positive impact on the cultivation of aesthetic character. After elaborating the significance and analyzing the status quo, this paper presents the strategy of implementing metaphor in middle school moral education. First of all, make clear the application of principles, which feature the combination of ideological level, moderation, figurativeness and instructiveness, neither of which is dispensable; second, emphasize that language use in moral education ought to coordinate the balance of "power of metaphor" and "power of logics", try to make the language poetic on the premise of guaranteeing scientific nature; third, on the basis of the openness of metaphorical thinking, propose the implementation of metaphorical Moral dialogue in a multidimensional way; and finally, starting from the "beauty" nature of metaphor, promote the building of a nice campus environment and the integration of kindness and beauty in middle school moral education.