Plant beauty in the heart and cultivate virtue in practice

Cai Yuanpei once said: "Aesthetic education can replace religion, and aesthetic education is the most important and basic outlook on life education." Establish self-aesthetic education awareness, discover beauty, experience beauty, create beauty, and activate the role of aesthetic education to the greatest extent This should also be the proper meaning of the question of students' self-aesthetic education.

Plant beauty in the heart, educate morality in action

The spring breeze of quality education blew in my face when I was in the fifth grade of elementary school. What I remember most is the high school wall." "Morality, Intelligence, Body, Art, and Labor" were written in big red characters. Regarding the definition of the characteristics of comprehensive quality talents in the new era, these five words are the answer that most people blurt out. Among these five characters, "beauty" can always bring us infinite reverie, just like this world full of wonderful things, and our hearts longing for a better future.

When I was a child, I thought "beauty" was the external appearance and form. If I understood it further, I would think it was art class or art education. When I got to college, I relied on the careful teaching of the aesthetics teacher to Gradually I realized that the word "beauty" written into the national education policy is not only the audience's feelings or understanding of aesthetic activities, but also what Zhu Guangqian said in "Silent Beauty", when people are helpless in reality, It is a way to find solace for transcendence, and is the "symbol of morality" that evokes Kant's wonder and awe - "the starry sky above and the moral law in the heart."

For contemporary college students, "aesthetic education" is a bridge between the real world and the ideal world. Mr. Cai Yuanpei, the first person to advocate aesthetic education in China, once said, "Aesthetic education can replace religion, and aesthetic education is the most important and basic outlook on life education." After nearly a hundred years of educational practice, the correctness and importance of this statement have been verified. The status of "beauty" in our lives has become more and more noble, and aesthetic education has penetrated into the lifelong education system and become an indispensable part of it. part.

Trace back: the past life of aesthetic education and traditional "rituals and music"

In China, it was in modern times that "aesthetic education" as a concept was clearly demonstrated, advocated and widely applied. But throughout our country’s ancient educational tradition, aesthetic education has always played an irreplaceable role. Through the elaboration and inheritance of our country's traditional culture, we can see the essence of "aesthetic education" more clearly, and through "serving the past for the present" and innovative extensions, we can better promote aesthetic education in university education.

The "six arts" in traditional Chinese culture refer to "rituals, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics." These six elements respected by the ancients can almost cover what we mentioned at the beginning of the article "Morality, intelligence, physical beauty and labor". From this point of view, the sages have actually designed a blueprint for individual development for us. So as the "previous life" that carries the development of aesthetic education, how does traditional culture define aesthetic education?

The "music" in the "Six Arts" can directly correspond to the concept of aesthetic education. The ancients were continuously nurtured in the education of music, poetry and other artistic subjects. In the process, the personal spiritual world was constantly enriched, and at the same time, they expanded their perspectives for understanding the world and exploring social development. Aesthetic education can not only make individual development more comprehensive, but more importantly, it can sublimate thoughts and temper will in the process of completing the accumulation of artistic literacy.

The core of traditional Chinese culture is "ritual and music culture". The ancients paid attention to "emotions are moved in the middle, so they are shaped by sounds", and they carefully compared external sounds with the individual's inner emotions. By standardizing the biological meaning of "sound", the word "music" came into being. A concept with sociological significance, combined with traditional "rituals", also has the function of "aesthetic education" in addition to art education. The function of aesthetic education is to let people transform their inner voices into social norms that conform to "etiquette and music" and make them acceptable to society through appropriate expression. Simply put, the combination of "rituals" and "music" is the process in which aesthetic education plays a role, and compliance with "ritual and music culture" is the result of aesthetic education. If there is only "music" but no "propriety", compared with modern times, it is equivalent to only art education without beauty education, and it loses its normative value to society; and if there is only "propriety" without "music", then it is quite Since there is only boring science and technology education, beauty education is also missing. So from this we can also see the connotation of aesthetic education.

Outlook: The present life and modern "virtue" of aesthetic education

For today's education, aesthetic education is to a large extent a creative inheritance of the idea of ??"rituals and music".

In university education, it plays a role in shaping and improving the basic literacy of college students, and can help college students better adjust their hearts in their study and life to adapt to the ever-changing external environment. Aesthetic education has important practical significance in harmonizing the hearts of college students at a time when employment and academic pressures are increasing. For a long time in the past, students have been learning and growing under strict external constraints and control. Our education has also lacked attention to aesthetic education, and the phenomenon of aesthetic absence has become even more prominent.

Excessive knowledge indoctrination and discipline awareness during the growth process of students crowd out the status that should belong to aesthetic education. Even if some schools and parents create opportunities for their children to be exposed to art education, they often focus on technology rather than appreciation. Therefore, at the university level, aesthetic education becomes even more urgent. After entering college and temporarily breaking free from various "shackles", aesthetic education can play a role in purifying students' minds and improving students' all-round development capabilities. Aesthetic education can provide nourishment for students' all-round development, cleanse and infiltrate students' minds in a "moisturizing and silent" way, and ultimately achieve the purpose of adjusting the emotions of college students and channeling their emotions, so that students can learn more in college. Students can better adapt to school life and adapt to society more quickly after leaving school, thereby achieving a harmonious and harmonious relationship between students and the external environment. This is also the lofty goal of aesthetic education in colleges and universities.

Excavation: discover beauty, experience beauty, create beauty

As students, how should we carry out self-aesthetic education? First of all, we must establish the awareness of actively discovering beauty and let ourselves have a pair of eyes to discover beauty. With the development of society, foreign cultures continue to pour in, which requires us to correctly understand the differences and differences between foreign culture and traditional Chinese culture in the process of activating our own aesthetic consciousness, and eliminate the "gap" with the traditional art and culture of the Chinese nation. . On the one hand, we should discover the beauty of China’s excellent traditional culture; on the other hand, we should discard the dross of foreign culture and accept advanced foreign culture.

After learning to discover beauty, the next step is to truly experience beauty. Judging from the current educational situation, most of our students are still in the inertia of exam-oriented education, do not have a deep understanding of aesthetic education, think that aesthetic education is just a formality, or even ignore aesthetic education, and are unable to form a deep feeling for beauty. Therefore, we should change from passive to active, actively participate in accessible aesthetic education courses or practices, so that we can truly benefit from aesthetic education, thereby further improving our own level, passing on culture and inheriting great beauty through the experience of beauty.

To allow yourself to experience beauty, you must first establish an additional aesthetic education evaluation system for yourself, increase your needs and standards for your own beauty, and place the evaluation of aesthetics and humanistic qualities in an important position. At the same time, they actively participate in aesthetic education courses, extensively experience various forms of aesthetic education, and meet their own aesthetic education needs from different perspectives. Starting from the above two points, you can truly experience the improvement and changes that aesthetic education brings to individuals in the process of improving your aesthetic abilities and humanistic qualities.

If discovering and experiencing beauty is the key to guiding young students to "get started" in aesthetic education; then creating beauty is a further requirement for our personal later development; the real function of aesthetic education should be Create beauty. To achieve this ultimate goal, it is necessary to give full play to the role of social practices related to aesthetic education.

For college students who have come from examination-oriented education, aesthetic education is "it is not too late to make up for the lost situation", and how to maximize the effect of "making up for it" requires students and colleges to work together. A subject to explore and discuss. For students, it is necessary to establish self-aesthetic education awareness through parallel methods of theory and practice, discover beauty, experience beauty, create beauty, and activate the role of aesthetic education to the greatest extent. This should also be part of the question of students' self-aesthetic education development. meaning.