Research On Neill’s Moral Emotion Education Thought

Alexander Sutherland Neill is a famous British educator and thinker in the 20 th century.Adhering to the basic concepts of freedom,democracy and equality,he founded Summerhill School,a children’s democratic school with the standards of happiness,sincerity,balanced development and gregarious.Neill’s most progressive point of view is to criticize the suppression of children’s emotional needs by traditional education.He firmly advocated the theory of goodness of nature,advocated that the moral problems caused by lack of emotion should be solved through the education of love,and put forward a unique and rich moral and emotional education method,which was successfully practiced in Summerhill School,and is still ahead of this era today.With the prosperity of social economy and the progress of science and technology,the excessive attention to knowledge under the domination of rationalism ignores the emotional needs of life and the emotional fields of education.The repressive system of modern industrial civilization undoubtedly destroys human nature and deprives children of the right to grow freely.Using psychoanalysis,Neill analyzes the deep causes of children’s moral problems,pays attention to children’s instinctive desires and inner needs,and uses freedom and love to resolve the contradiction and conflict between self and superego in children’s spirit.He thought about the essence of moral education from the emotional point of view,emphasizing the respect for individual integrity value,which has profound reference significance for reflecting on the current moral crisis of minors.First,from the historical dimension,it combs the emergence and development of Neill’s thought of moral emotion education,including personal experience,historical background and theoretical origin.From his childhood experience to his teaching practice and years of educational experiments after the establishment of Summerhill,Neill’s personal experiences at each stage have laid a solid practical foundation for him to regard emotion as an important factor of moral education.The deep-rooted democratic tradition in Britain gave birth to the spirit of the age of freedom,the surging rationalism after the capitalist industrial revolution brought the loss of individual emotions,and the new education movement that arose in the early 20 th century paid more attention to the autonomy and spiritual strength of children,so Neill’s thought of moral emotion education came into being under the broad background of The Times.The psychoanalysis,naturalistic pedagogy and pragmatic philosophy of thinkers such as Homer Lane,Sigmund Freud,Wilhelm Reich,Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey have provided profound theoretical sources for the emergence and development of Neill’s thought of moral emotion education.Secondly,it analyzes and discusses the basic propositions of Neill’s moral emotion education from four dimensions: purpose,content,method and condition.Neill opposed the traditional view of education,including religious education,school education and family education to bring negative emotions to children.He believes that the prerequisite of moral education is to give children "real freedom",to use freedom to satisfy individual instinctive desires and emotional needs,and to stimulate the ability of individual lovers with respect and equality.In the practice of education in Summerhill School,he uses various methods such as democratic management,individual talks,artistic activities and "inspired" discipline to carry out moral education for children,with love as the first and emotion as the intermediary,to promote the free development of students’ personality.It embodies the characteristics of emotion,human nature and embodiment.Thirdly,it evaluates Neill’s thought of moral emotion education dialectically from the perspective of value and limitation.The value of Neill’s thought of moral emotion education lies in that it goes beyond the single point of view of moral education,carries on the inquiry from the ontology emphasizing the value of individual integrity,provides children’s moral correction and cultivation examples.Neill’s thought is unique,but there are too radical and extreme problems,into the vortex of irrationalism,caused a wide range of controversy;Questions and criticisms from the outside world prompted Neill to isolate the school from society,leading to the widespread problem of social detachment among Summerhill graduates;Due to the limitations of Summerhill’s practical experience,its definition of "freedom" still needs to accept the test of time.Finally,it excavates the progress of Neill’s moral emotion education thought,draws on its inner vitality,takes it as its value lead,enables our moral education system with emotion,and explores the new thought of our moral education reform practice.Based on the moral status and educational practice of minors,the following enlightenment is obtained: In the concept of moral education,we should stimulate the conscious idea of feeling people,set up the concept of emotional attribution,and abandon the mechanism of moral indoctrination;In the way of moral education,we should broaden the implementation channel of educating people with emotion,innovate the way of cultivating emotion and strengthen the education of moral empathy.In the atmosphere of moral education,it is necessary to create the environment atmosphere of emotional people,perfect the school atmosphere system,and ensure the intimate relationship of family.