警惕高等教育质量项目化

前段时间我接到一个任务,就是参与评选省级一流本科专业。既然是一流本科专业,当然可以代表高质量的本科教育,因而我也就被卷入到高等教育质量评价事务中来。在评选的过程中,我感觉很多方面很难进行比较,可以进行比较的往往是那些标签化的人才培养项目,如入选或获批某个级别的特色品牌专业、实验教学示范中心、人才培养基地等等。于是,没有这些标志性成果的专业就很难入围。我本人近期也参加了一个人才项目的申报,“立德树人成效”是其中特别重要的评价维度之一。

The quality and evaluation of higher education is an eternal topic. In general, the evaluation of higher education quality includes five elements: evaluation guiding ideology, evaluation index system, evaluation procedure, evaluation subject and evaluation results. At present, the evaluation index system of higher education quality in China is not scientific enough. Especially, the evaluation of undergraduate teaching is not guided by the fundamental values for improving the quality of personnel training. Therefore, the new index system still lacks the scheme of indicators that are necessary to encourage the innovative and quality personnel training. The quality of higher education is facing five trends of development: from adaptation to guidance, from techniques to humanity, from intelligence to wisdom, from knowledge to thinking, and from process to result. A deep understanding of these trends and related problems is of great significance for improving the quality of higher education and promoting the development of higher education. From the perspective of quality management of higher education, "management" can be divided into three levels: the first level is "management", with the effect pointing to control; the second level is "reason", with the effect pointing to rationalization; and the third level is "security", with the effect pointing to stability. The major shortcomings of higher education lie in its alienation from "safety", lack of "reason" and excessive focus on "management", which marks higher education far from quality construction. Facing the new requirements of higher education development in the new era such as the supplier of public goods in higher education, we need to rethink the past and accommodate the shortcomings to construct a most suitable quality construction and evaluation system for higher education that guides and optimizes the demand, adheres to the spiritual quality, and provides the society with more effective and more suitable higher education supply. At present, in the construction of higher education quality quality, "projects" are regarded as an important means to improve the quality of higher education, which have been widely used and have a trend of gradual expansion. However, the "projects" may not improve and represent the quality of higher education, but it may suspend, beautify, or even distort the quality of higher education. The phenomenon of "project-oriented quality of higher education" requires vigilant attention. Higher education in the new era should take the cultivation of people’s "self-consciousness" as its fundamental orientation, and seek joint efforts to form the quality effect of higher education in all aspects such as discipline construction, specialty construction, curriculum construction and teaching reforms. In order to make correct view of quality higher education, we must not forget our original intentions and determinations to the local characteristics of Chinese higher education. In this respect, Yuelu Academy’s profound philosophy of "learning to achieve nature" and "seeking truth from facts", and Jinling College’s motto of four-dimensional talent quality standard "sincerity, reality, diligence and benevolence" may provide us with useful wisdom and practical path for further thinking about the quality standards and quality construction of higher education. The teaching quality of ideological and political courses in higher education is related to the implementation of fundamental tasks to build morality and cultivate people. We should conduct in-depth investigations and research, adopt targeted strategies and measures, and strive to improve the teaching quality of ideological and political courses.