试论张楚廷的教育美学

An Essay on ZHANG Chuting's Educational Aesthetics

我国当代教育家张楚廷将其教育思想整个地建立在美学基础之上,并在其大学校长管理、课堂教学和语言修养中进行种种教育之美的创造。他认为,人是一种美的存在,人能通过美的创造不断获得新生命。人对美的自觉在于通过教育来培养、提升人的审美、发现美与创造美的能力。对于一个自觉的生命来说,自我教育是一个永远都未完成的生命塑造之旅。对于一个自觉的教育家来说,教育是一件永远都未完成的艺术品。针对教育内外种种矫饰、异化教育的认识,张楚廷认为,当教育是教育自己时,即服务于人的自我创造之时是美的。

Professor ZHANG Chuting is a prominent contemporary educator of China. He premised all his educational ideas on aesthetics, and faithfully practiced his educational aesthetics in his university presidency, classroom teaching and instructional discourses. Professor Zhang holds that the mere existence of human being is a beauty, and humans can renew their life through continuous aesthetic creation. He believed that human's awareness of beauty consists in their capacity for cultivation to develop and uplift their aesthetics and the ability to discover and create beauty. For a person, self-education is an endless journey of shaping and perfecting oneself. For an educator, education is an artwork that will never be deemed to have approached perfection. Commenting on sumptuous ornaments and alienation of education, he maintains that education is aesthetic only if it endows students with consciousness and creativity in their education, that is, education is aesthetic when it serves the purpose of human being's selfeducation. ZHANG Chuting is a creator of educational art. His ideas on educational aesthetics originated from his university management as a president, his classroom teaching and his classroom discourse refinement. He asserts that what a university refers to is its grand 'learning', i.e., a university is a place where people seek true excellency and great wisdom. He believes that a university is true to its name only when it is the place where people create beauty, which can only be realized through its 'scholarship'. Accordingly, he made promoting the university's cultural accumulation his core work, when he stepped onto the position of a university's president. He hoped that the maturity, solemnity, and vitality of the university would bring the students enjoyment of beauty. ZHANG Chuting served two separate terms of the university presidency, skillfully managed drawing on his educational aesthetics and ultimately enhanced its sense of self-empowerment, self-confidence and freedom. Professor ZHANG Chuting is an indefatigable in thinking and teaching. His teaching is never impartment of erudition only, but also the presentation of his active thinking, thereby stimulating the thinking of the students. He advocates that the key to a university is 'scholarship', or rather, research. Research is to seek knowledge, to learn to ask questions, and to learn in solving problems, so naturally college classroom teaching should carry out such idea. Professor ZHANG believes that teaching is essentially the process of students being enlightened with how to think and study by a teacher who is studying or has ever studied the field, and that the most excellent education is under way when the teacher and students are absorbed in an continuous inquiry into the unknown. Language is the media of the communication of ideas, and the real education occurred after the emergence of language. ZHANG Chuting said that the art of speaking is the manifestation of the depth and width of one's thought, and unique words reflect one's unique thinking. He believes that the discourse refinement and deliberation of a self-conscious teacher will find its resources in his erudition, and have a stress on his introspection of concepts and his diversified language use. Additionally, except for the speech, a teacher possesses another powerful language for the students-- a nonverbal language, that is, a teacher's 'conduct', the core of which is a teacher's self-cultivation and qualities. A teacher's attitude towards knowledge, truth, and people is often displayed in his nonverbal language-- a teacher's manners, and appearances are natural manifestations of his erudition, thinking, kindness and modesty.