The study of the thinking of Taiwan's humanistic education in recent years

• Main Author: 劉維哲
• Other Authors: 齊力
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/41541379738268473679

碩士 === 臺北市立教育大學 === 社會科教育學系碩士班 === 97 === The purpose of this study is to explore the development of Taiwan’s humanistic educational movements in recent years as well as the concept of educational thinking of Taiwan’s humanistic education. This study adopts qualitative research. Research methods applied in this study include document analysis and in-depth interviews. The ideas, practice and the possible problems of Taiwan’s humanistic education are discussed in the final part of the article. The results are as follows: The development of Taiwan's humanistic educational movements in recent years can be divided into four phases: The first phase(before 1987)was the period of repression, during which humanistic education was affected by politics, economics and culture, and it was ignored and even suppressed deliberately；the second phase(1987-1994)was the period of embryo, during which humanistic education was developed steadily in a free and democratic environment due to abolishment of martial law and economic development；the third phase(1994-2003) was the period of development, during which the ideas of humanistic education were implemented in various educational policies, and the forth phase(after 2003)was the period of rethinking. This study presents a rethinking of humanistic education in terms of the subjectivity of education and finds that humanistic education emphasizes the principal of students but neglects the whole person development of teachers, as a result, the principal of teachers is overlooked. Moreover, the thinking of Taiwan's humanistic education includes five core concepts: human nature, love, subjectivity, freedom and discipline and learning. For human nature, people’s good nature is esteemed. The instinct of survival is nothing to do with good and evil, and the evil is a product of the environment. As for the interpretation of love, it stands for giving, care, duty, respect and understanding. However, love doesn’t mean to accept everything. Students with problem behaviors should be loved and supported. For the subjective education, the purpose of education is the self-realization, but the subjective education should be implemented based on “inter- subjectivity” to avoid subjective confrontations. For freedom and discipline, all human beings are born free, but there is no absolute freedom. Discipline is emphasized and it has to be developed through self-discipline. Teachers are encouraged to teach by using “positive discipline” at teaching sites. For learning, the importance of knowledge education should be stressed, and the physical and psychological maturity of students, learning motivations and personal experiences also should be taken into account. Students should develop competitiveness as courage, confidence and ability to cope with difficulties. Effective learning depends on improvement of teachers' effectiveness. Finally, the problems of implementation of humanistic education include: democracy is not easy to achieve on campus, ethical conduct of students is not as good as expected, students lack of discipline and the learning efficacy is decreased. These problems reflect the restrictions of humanistic education, including lack of systematic and in-depth discussions about the dark side of human nature, overestimate of children's moral development, the emphasis of a certain subjectivity which may lead to damage of another subjectivity or opposition between subjectivity, students' difficulty of maintaining learning motivation without competitiveness, too much confidence in students' "active learning", limitations of learning methods , students’ lack of democracy and the failure of the realization of law spirit.