The Unique Cultural Value of Labor Education Labor | China | Culture
Author: Ma Huizi and Ma Mei
The great cause nurtures the great spirit, and the great spirit promotes the great cause. Labor, as an important source of vitality for the Chinese nation, will undoubtedly contribute more wisdom and strength to the construction of modern civilization of the Chinese nation.
General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized at the cultural inheritance and development symposium: "To continue to promote cultural prosperity, build a cultural power, and build a modern civilization of the Chinese nation at a new historical starting point, we must strengthen cultural self-confidence, adhere to our own path, and base ourselves on the great history of the Chinese nation. Practice and contemporary practice, use Chinese principles to summarize Chinese experience, upgrade Chinese experience to Chinese theory, and achieve spiritual independence." Summarizing Chinese experience, speaking Chinese truth, developing Chinese theory, and carrying forward the Chinese spirit must be based on Chinese practice. Passing on Chinese experience through labor education and developing Chinese practice will help continue to create, inherit and carry forward the Chinese people. Our own culture can better shoulder the new cultural mission.
Enlightenment and Infiltration: Labor Education is the Starting Point of Cultural Enlightenment
The term "culture" originated from cultivation, production, handicrafts, and skills in labor practice. Labor, as a material force for human development, as Engels explained in his book "The Role of Labor in the Transformation from Apes to Humans," is "the first fundamental condition of human life.". Labor not only created people themselves, but even "the entire so-called world history is nothing more than a process of human birth through human labor.". In the long river of world cultural history, there exist rich ideas on labor education. In Zhu Xi's "Instructions for Childhood Enlightenment", "sweeping and purifying" was regarded as the enlightenment education for children. Rousseau's "Emile" highly valued manual labor and regarded it as an effective intermediary for rebuilding the body and knowledge. Chinese educator Tao Xingzhi once said, "If one cannot grow vegetables, they are not considered students.". Labor is a necessary path for human beings to transition from naturalness to cultural development. For the development of humans and society, it is the source of education, culture, and spirit. Labor education can provide dual guidance for human body and spirit, enabling people to face the needs of production and development. It emphasizes the cultivation of cultural knowledge that is beneficial to social development while inheriting knowledge and skills, in order to carry out cultural enlightenment and education.
Currently, various labor education activities and courses carried out in primary, secondary, and tertiary schools across the country have created scenarios, constructed fields, and enriched carriers for the infiltration and inheritance of traditional Chinese culture and modern civilization, and have unique and important significance.
Integrity and Innovation: Promoting Cultural Practice through Labor Education
Labor is a unique activity that occurs between humans and nature, as well as between humans. Therefore, labor cannot be separated from the "web of meaning woven by humans themselves", that is, culture; The essence of labor education is the production, dissemination, and influence of knowledge and value, that is, cultural practice. From the perspective of the attributes of the object, labor education is the essence of cultural practice. Through practical labor practice, labor education improves people's production and labor ability, changes the organization and system of people's production and labor, promotes the progress of human material culture, and further promotes the deepening and innovation of cultural practice. At the same time, labor education is also a carrier of cultural practice, and cultural integration is an important form of labor education in current primary, secondary, and tertiary schools. Through labor education, excellent traditional culture that has developed from ancient times to today can be inherited, not forgetting its origins, providing a "source of vitality" for cultural practice, and continuously forging new cultural brilliance.
Labor education consolidates the subjectivity of individuals in labor practice, and through this integrated education of body and mind, it brings comprehensive development in physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects, thereby further consolidating the subjectivity of individuals in cultural practice.
Consciousness and Transcendence: Deepening Cultural Identity through Labor Practice
For cultural identity, there should be at least two levels of understanding, one of which is "cultural self-awareness". Mr. Fei Xiaotong believes that people living in a certain cultural and historical circle have self-awareness of their culture, and have a full understanding of its development process and future. In other words, it is the self-awareness, self reflection, and self creation of culture. Cultural self-awareness is not only a quantitative accumulation of traditional and current knowledge, but also an intelligent consciousness that may be diluted in the future, based on both content and process. The agency and creativity of cultural identity, as well as the sense of value and identity, can only be stimulated and realized in concrete practice. The second is "cultural transcendence". Transcendence is not to abandon it with a scornful eye, but to take its essence from its dross with a caring attitude, to realize the integration and rebirth of reality and tradition, to better inherit, break through and innovate with the responsibility of the cultural subject, and to "communicate, collide and rebirth" with the real culture through labor practice. If specific practical paths are lost, cultural identity will only become a slogan, and both practice and culture will lose their subjectivity. Labor education contains the wisdom of creating beauty through labor. Whether it is traditional crafts such as rural planting, printing and dyeing, paper fan and clay sculpture, cutting and weaving, daily household chores, or the application of technological production technology, they are all traces of civilization and wisdom. Only through labor practices that are widely embedded in production and life can we further inspire the cultural creativity of the masses, allowing cultural consciousness and transcendence to penetrate into everyone's heart.
Our cultural confidence comes from our confidence in China's excellent traditional culture, revolutionary culture, and advanced socialist culture, which has been refined through the practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics. In the face of new cultural missions in the new era, only by becoming the main body of labor practice, as the main body of human civilization and social production, can people construct more scientific and stable ideological cognition when facing various contradictions and problems, strengthen cultural confidence, promote cultural prosperity, build a cultural power, and build a modern civilization of the Chinese nation.
Guangming Daily
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