On Social Ethics Education Of Contemporary China With Pre-Qin Confucian Rites And Music Culture

In this thesis, social ethics means the moral rules that all citizens should follow in social interaction and public life, covering the relationships between man and man, man and society, man and nature. Social ethics education is an important part of moral education, and the level of social ethics education not only directly affects the ethical quality of members of a society, but also reflects the level of social civilization as a whole. The overall level of China’s current public morality education is not high, which mainly embodied by its value-oriented dominated by the quick success, its contents merely emphasizing political ideology, and by its methods merely emphasizing class moral instilling. All of the bias results in ineffective education, inadequate social ethics literacy, indifferent civic awareness and the rapidly declining level of social ethics as a whole. Accordingly, to innovate public morality education and improve contemporary citizens’ public morality literacy, we need innovative education content, innovative education methods and improve public morality education system. On this point, the social ethics education thoughts of pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music culture has provided us with many useful insights.The "Rites" in pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music culture, has a double meaning. It denotes not only the inner noble moral character of men but also the external, instrument, rituals, ceremonies and other norms of civilized behavior. On the whole, pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music culture is based on moral feelings, essentially reflects the spirit of specialization (segregation), takes Renyi as core ideology, inherently requires respectfulness and comity, takes moderation as criterion of practice, and aims at harmony. It focuses on conducting both internally and externally, emphasises the combinations of Rites and Music, and highlights the unity of Theory and Practice. It seeks for "Inside Saint" and "Outside King".Thus it has a rich and profound morality implication.In resources of ethics, the thoughts of pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music takes Renyi as its core. It strongly advocates "filial duty", respectfulness, self-denial, humility, values based on harmony, courtesy calling for reciprocity, self-restraining and self-regulation in privacy, and honesty and trustworthiness as its moral rules, which represents the essence of ancient Chinese traditional virtues and contains a pursuit of eternal and universal values of the true, the good and the beautiful. Even our society has undergone fundamental changes and the era has been historically changed in today, these rich and valuable moral resources can still be used as the essence of an excellent traditional culture into contents of contemporary morality education. It should be noted that, in a way, the social ethics education thoughts of pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music culture inevitably has its times limitations, class stand and class limitations. Thus we should accept the good and reject the bad when draw from the nutrition components in the thoughts pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music, especially creatively transform its specific virtue and adapt it to modern social life and the socialist market economy.In regard to education contents, the thoughts of pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music stresses the unity of internal and external, the unity of knowledge and action, and devotes much attention to Rites and Music both applied, morality and feeling blended, Rites and laws connected, and ruling both by virtue and law. This tells us that morality norms should be concrete and operational. In other words, social ethics education should strive to not only focus on high moral culture of the people inside, but also to the actions etiquette education of the people outward; make efforts to shape people’s healthy personality, elegance and cultured human behavior; include both moral knowledge and theory imparting and moral emotion and moral will education; not only highlight modern moral education, but also the socialist legal education.In regard to education methods, the key idea of pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music includes adequately respecting for the dominant position of the educated, and fully arousing the moral consciousness, the initiative and the enthusiasm of the educated. The specific approach includes role playing behavior education, practice education, demonstrating with typical examples, individualized education and correct media guidance. It has been proved in practice that these educational approach is effective not only in that case, but also in today’s morality education practice.Based on critically inheriting and creatively transforming, carrying forward pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music culture, and innovating contemporary Chinese social ethics education is in the nature of construction of socialist culture with Chinese characteristics.For this, firstly, we should innovate the content of morality education by constructing a new system of morality norms and highlighting the modern civilized etiquette education. Secondly, we should the methods of morality education,that is, constructing morality practice generation mode, so that the morality education transformed from knowledge imparting(a one-sided, abstract and theoretical education) to practice education; constructing active morality acceptance model, so that the morality education transformed from compulsory indoctrination to permeate education; constructing morality self-education mode, so that morality education transformed from one-way conversation to communication and critical reflection. Thirdly, we should build a complete social morality education system,in which school education, family education and social education complement, support, interact and help each other.Furthermore, the effectiveness of social morality education is not only closely related with the education itself, but also with a favorable public opinion guidance and effective legal supervision. Therefore we should still actively create a favorable public opinion environment and explore a scientific road of moral legalization, which avoids the possible "mismatch" in moral and law, and excessive moral legalization.Anyway, the pre-Qin Confucian Rites and Music culture has abundant profound significance of social morality education, which provides modern Chinese social morality education with available suggestion and examples. The realistic road to innovate social morality education is both innovating social ethics education and creating a favorable public opinion guidance and effective legal supervision.