Zhou Haihong: What is the use of art education?

Zhou Haihong is a music aesthetician and former vice president of the Central Conservatory of Music

From chai rice oil and salt to creation and invention, art education is exerting a huge force that cannot be ignored. Why does art education affect everyone's ability to attain happiness and experience happiness? Let's take a look!

01

What is the use of art

What is art for? The question is the same nature as asking someone "why drink?"

Why is this issue in particular discussed in China? Because for so many years, art in China has been a dispensable thing after dinner.

Now many parents ask their children to do nothing but study every day. Anything that has nothing to do with learning is seen as a "waste of time." Some parents show off their successful parenting experience online: in their schedule, everything that has nothing to do with the entrance exam is useless.

They fill every minute of their children, and in it, there is no art, no games, no dating, no freedom. If you are such a parent, you should know that the most important thing that affects the happiness of a person's life, you did not let the child learn, but let him learn a lot of useless things.

Parents may think that this will give the child the life he wants. I want to tell you: You are ruining your child's life. A large number of our parents put rational and intellectual things in their children's childhood. Let the child count, memorize the small nine-nine, and even memorize the periodic table. When you do so-called early education like this, afraid that the child will lose at the starting line, you are: winning at the starting line and losing at the terminal station. You deprive your child of the opportunity to develop his or her sensual qualities.

02

Experiencing happiness requires quality

People's material level has improved, but they may not necessarily know how to feel happiness.

People have two major mental faculties, one is rationality and the other is sensibility. The representative of reason is science; the representative of sensibility is art. Science conquers the world, and art beautifies the world.

The two are like the two wings of a bird. If parents do not pay attention to the development of children's emotional consciousness from an early age, it will make the happiness of children's life in vain.

If a person wants to achieve happiness for a lifetime, he must not only have the quality of "obtaining happy living conditions", but also have the quality of "experiencing happiness feelings".

Have you ever wondered why some people live dirty, messy, poor, monotonous and boring lives? With the concept of "perceptual quality", this problem will be solved: the person's perceptual quality is low, and he does not feel the impact of the environment.

If a person's perceptual quality is low, he will often ignore and abandon the requirements for the perceptual quality of the environment.

There was a couple, two people fighting. The reason is that they want to buy a washing machine, 1600 yuan to look good, 1400 yuan to be ugly.

On the surface, the husband and wife have differences, but the actual reason is that the two sides have different requirements for the emotional quality of the environment, and the deep reason is that the emotional quality of both parties is high or low.

Remind everyone: if your emotional qualities are different, you will have serious differences in values. People with high perceptual quality are often willing to pay the cost of beautifying the environment and enjoying life.

So, you can know why couples are particularly prone to quarrels when decorating? Because that's a big exposure of the quality of sensibility.

Not only that, people with low emotional quality will not enjoy life. Or, conversely, not enjoying life is due to low perceptual qualities.

I used to take a cruise ship to visit Guilin. There were two people on board the cruise ship, and it took three full hours to sleep from start to finish. Some people travel like this: get in the car to sleep, get out of the car to pee, go to the point to take pictures.

When you go out to travel, don't partner with people with low emotional quality - it is particularly boring. They have no interest in anything, either sleeping or playing cards.

A delicate, sensitive, and rich person has a much higher quality of life than a dull, tedious, numb person.

If a person wants to achieve happiness for a lifetime, he must first have the conditions for a happy life. Feeling numb, many people lose the happy life they could have experienced.

Why do many people not feel that happiness has come as scheduled after the material level has improved? Because there are conditions, but there is no experience, the fundamental reason is the low quality of sensibility. When our material living standards improve but lack cultural and artistic enjoyment, it will also breed many social problems that poor societies do not have. For example, alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling.

03

The cultivation of perceptual qualities should be realized through art education

The total amount of a person's life is a constant, and if it is not spent in these places, it will always be spent somewhere else. In the era of "the elegant is king", without paying attention to artistic quality, it is as difficult to succeed as if there is no knowledge.

Some parents will say that there are no material conditions for a happy life, and how to talk about the feeling of a happy life. There must always be conditions first, and then experience, right?

So let me talk about it from the most utilitarian point of view, what is the use of art education with perceptual quality? Everyone's so-called success now is basically to become an official, to be a leader, and to earn money, so let's talk about it from the perspective of making money:

In the past quite a long period of history, there is a particularly obvious gap between the domestic products of our country and the imported products of developed countries: the appearance is ugly, the process is rough, and the use is not humane. We summarize this phenomenon with a philosophical perspective: the low quality of sensibility.

The quality of the product, in fact, there are two aspects of the quality composition: the quality of the function, to be practical, a broken plastic cup can drink water into the mouth, the function is enough. The quality of sensibility, that is, aesthetics, practical and aesthetic, is the quality of a product.

Many entrepreneurs don't realize this. The broken cup that drinks the water into the mouth - the cup with a little design - there is a little good-looking cup, in this process, the improvement is not the functional quality, the improvement is the emotional quality. The increase in the price of the product, the doubling of the added value of the product, is not a change in functionality, but a change in the experience.

But it is particularly regrettable that many entrepreneurs in our country, due to their low perceptual quality, when it comes to the time when the product should be upgraded, they will always work on the function. They have made a lot of new features, but they have ignored the improvement of perceptual quality and are unwilling to increase the cost of perceptual quality. In the end, your product was replaced, but it was not upgraded.

The difference between high-end and low-end products is not the difference in functionality. Which cottage goods do not have powerful features? Are luxury goods and daily necessities function the same? In fact, the experience is different.

What did Apple do to conquer the world? Apple's core competitiveness is to turn technology into art and products into works. Its core competitiveness is the wisdom of sensibility.

The formation of human perceptual qualities is a critical period in childhood. The critical period of the formation of people's aesthetic tastes, aesthetic standards, and aesthetic preferences is in childhood.

Human beings have a very large instinct, called adaptation - children who live in garbage heaps from childhood will have a sense of adaptation to the dirty, chaotic and poor environment; and children who grow up in a beautiful and elegant environment will have a sense of discomfort and disgust from the senses for the dirty, chaotic and poor environment.

I have never been a nostalgic person, but I have always been dissatisfied with culture and art. I always recall the cartoons I watched when I was a child, "The Great Haunting of the Heavenly Palace", "Nezha Noisy Sea", and "Three Monks", and the imported cartoons at that time were "Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck", "Flower Fairy" and "Smurfs". So, what are our children looking at now?

When children are particularly happy to watch in front of poor art production, vulgar bridges, and cartoons containing a lot of wrong values, I want to remind parents: your brain should be "tight" a string.

When the clumsy aesthetic taste and vulgar things are packaged together into the child's young mind, the child will treat the future art with such fun in the future. But we can't defend ourselves.

Maybe fathers and mothers have countless expectations about the nobility and elegance of their children's future; they may also spend a lot of money to send their children to this school, to that kindergarten. But now such a harsh aesthetic environment pollutes our children. All your visions of your child's life have been ruined.

Where is the way out? There is no doubt that the perceptual quality of the whole nation is enhanced.

The cultivation of perceptual qualities should be achieved through art education. We must make "love of beauty" a sense of moral superiority and let beauty have the moral upper hand. Only in this way can this society be changed.

04

If you want to be successful and happy, you have loved art since childhood

"Learn mathematics, physics and chemistry well, and walk all over the world without fear." This slogan has been rapidly disseminated since the reform and opening up, and it is easy to understand, so that our people attach importance to science and rationality.

I also want to invent a similar communication phrase to make people pay attention to art: if you want to be successful and happy, love art from an early age.

That's why I go around appealing for our whole society to attach importance to art, to art education, and to all kinds of artistic literacy. Art can cultivate our perceptual qualities, enhance perceptual wisdom, beautify our lives, and promote the development of human perceptual civilization.

A good perceptual experience is a concrete experience of a happy life. The perceptual quality of the people is the basic guarantee for a beautiful environment, social harmony and cultural innovation. Perceptual civilization is an important pillar of balanced social development.

Finally, I would like to say that a life without artistic aesthetics is a boring and tedious life; a nation that lacks artistic education is a civilized and backward nation; and a society that lacks aesthetic pursuit is a society that grows up barbarically.

Source: Shouwang New Education