Abstract:

The Society of Risk: Are We Ready for It?
——The Thinking and Response on the Urgency of
National Social Education in the Period of Transition(1.School of Liberal Arts, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China; 2.Center of National
Spirit and Quality, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Shanghai 200020, China)Abstract： In the process of global modernization, the significance and role of national social education in the world has become increasingly prominent. But, in contemporary China, social education, which should go hand in hand with school education and family education, falls into inaction for various reasons, and even loses weight evidently. This essay, from the perspective of multidimension, tries to probe into the causes and consequences of losing weight in social education from the source, as well as the possible countermeasures and paths, and improve the quality of the national response to the risk and promoting the construction of harmonious society, so as to ensure that the Chinese society transforming from tradition to modern can "go well all the way". Therefore, the author points out that, for the concrete practice of national social (or ethical) education, the first thing to do is attaching importance to pragmatism, that is, strengthening the education of social symbiosis to face the risk of social conflict; strengthening the education of humanistic care to face the risk of hightechniques; strengthening the education of modern environmental awareness to face the risk of frequent natural disasters. In all these kinds of education, a special attention should first be paid to cleaning or cutting the bad habits and potential regulations that may counteract seriously the positive education. Secondly, in the process of implementing social (or ethical) education, the content should be progressive and continuous, and the form should be varied and routine, and the goal should also highlight the compatibility, so as to be helpful in producing a "superposition effect" for the ideas and behavior of symbiotic human. Thirdly, in view of the objective facts of social division of work, for the demand of education, social elites should be higher than general public, so as to turn social elites into true "social examples". Finally, as an important part in cultural construction, social education should accompany the construction of new villages, small towns and modern communities, which have appeared since the inception of the new century, so as to achieve the combination of firmness and flexibility——the complementation of hardware construction and software construction.