Singh
The Chinese edition of Professor Yoshimi Toshiya's "The Impact of abolishing the Ministry of Liberal Arts" has finally been released. Judging from the title, It seems that Professor Yoshimi wants to severely criticize the "strange" policy of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology on the one hand, and on the other hand, he also wants to raise the flag for the liberal arts in an "unequal position". But after reading it carefully, I found that Professor Yoshimi really cared about the future of Japanese universities and Young Japanese people. Whether it is the criticism of the logic of "emphasizing the light of literature", the concern about the crisis of the existence of Japanese universities, and the discussion of the proper state of human resource development, all reflect Professor Yoshimi's sense of responsibility and mission as a researcher in the field of liberal arts at Japan's top national universities.
In June 2015, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of the Japanese government issued the Notice on Reconsideration of the Organization and Business of National Universities, etc., stressing that "undergraduate and graduate schools, especially teacher training majors and humanities and social sciences majors, should take into account the reduction of the 18-year-old population, the demand for human resources, the guarantee of teaching and research standards, and the responsibilities of national universities when formulating organizational reform plans, and abolish related organizations or actively try to transform into areas with high social demand.". It is considered to be a "de-liberal arts" in national universities.
The connotation of "liberal arts" and "usefulness" of "otherization"
In China in the 1980s, with the recovery of the college entrance examination and the promotion of the reform and opening up policy, industrial development and technological innovation became the keywords of the times, and the concept of "learning mathematics, physics and chemistry well, walking all over the world is not afraid". Of course, this slogan has a distinct characteristic of the times, but it reflects the tendency to put the choice of "liberal arts" or "science" in the consciousness and to make it problematic.
As Professor Yoshimi said in "The Impact of the Abolition of the Liberal Arts Department", "Opposing the idea that the liberal arts are useless but valuable in the form of 'the liberal arts are useless, you might as well abandon them' cannot be opposed to the logic of 'science is useful, so it is valuable'", because in this way, "the position that 'liberal arts' can advocate can only add icing on the cake to the usefulness of 'science'", and "the liberal arts" has been completely "other" at this time. This logic makes it necessary for the "liberal arts" to exist before it can be recognized after positioning the "science" as a "universal truth" that is "useful and valuable"—that is, a measure by a certain scale. At this time, the unnecessary act of "defending the liberal arts" is forcibly given meaning, and "liberal arts" and "science" are no longer equal sides in the debate stage, but one is the "self" as a "scale" and the other is the "other" who accepts "scrutiny".
"The Impact of the Abolition of the Ministry of Liberal Arts", [Japanese] Toshiya Yoshimi / by Wang Jing, Shi Ge / Translation, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, August 2022 edition
But Professor Yoshimi offers another line of thinking, which is to re-examine the connotation of "useful" itself. First of all, he proposed two dimensions of "usefulness", namely "usefulness of accomplishing purpose" and "usefulness of value creation". The former's "mode of thinking is mainstream in science and engineering", while the liberal arts are good at discovering "purpose or value scales", so that society "re-examines the original value scale" or "creates a new value scale". This view deconstructs the evaluative word "useful," which is rather "pragmatic" in Japanese. In addition, Professor Yoshimi cites Weber's concepts of "instrumental rationality" and "value rationality", which corresponds the "usefulness" of the completion purpose type to the "expected goal or determined value", leaving only the "usefulness" when "thinking about the best means to achieve the end", when instrumental rationality is in a "self-enclosed" system and "cannot break through the existing system from within". Professor Yoshimi's citation is mainly to elicit a topic where the "scale of value" is not set in stone. Because once the scale of value changes, the original "purpose" will also change, and the "useful" premised on the completion of the purpose will immediately lose its meaning.
Science requires results in a short period of time, while liberal arts require that people's "intellectual activities" be validated in a "long period of all time.". In today's Chinese universities, we can see that scholars majoring in science and engineering are often professors and doctoral supervisors at a young age, and various academic titles are added; The liberal arts, on the other hand, are a completely different story. In particular, young scholars in the humanities, such as Literature, History and Philosophy, which many consider useless to learn, are often difficult to write and find a position, and they have a difficult time living in the environment of "either promotion or departure". This is because the cycle of knowledge output in the arts and sciences is very different, and if we insist on measuring everything by the "scale" of the knowledge output cycle of science and engineering, it is bound to lead to the infinite squeeze of the living space of the liberal arts. As a result, new scales of value cannot be created, and people will "not know where to go and be at a loss."
As Mr. Yoshimi said, "The way science is useful and the liberal arts are useless but valuable" is a "big mistake." It should be said that "the knowledge production of science is mostly effective in the short term, while the knowledge production of the liberal arts can be useful in the long term."
"Capitalized" university
"Three times in life, I went to college."
Japanese universities experienced the "Cambrian explosion" (i.e., the sharp increase in the number of universities in a short period of time) against the background of declining birthrates and aging, and then underwent "neoliberal reforms" such as "syllabusing" (relaxation of restrictions on liberal education), "prioritization" (increase in the proportion of master's and doctoral students), and "legalization". Changes in social backgrounds, demographic changes, and setbacks in university reform have challenged and faced major challenges and dilemmas for Japanese universities, especially national universities. Professor Yoshimi believes that the most fundamental problem in the reform of Japanese universities lies in "redefining the concept of the university itself." In the Internet society, people tend to "search online for things", and it seems that they can have multiple ways to obtain knowledge without entering the university. In this case, it is necessary to "orient the university in life", that is, to reverse the "university" that only the 18-year-old who graduated from high school can enter, that is, "the organization that performs excessive etiquette from 'high school student' to 'social person'" to "an organization that can participate freely at all stages of life, or an organization that provides a career turnaround". Here, Professor Yoshimi makes a refreshing point of view- "three times in life" that "three times in life" is that 18-year-old high school graduates, 35-year-old workplace "social people" and retirees in their 60s should all be "capitalized" university participants.
This view completely subverts most people's stereotypes about universities. At the high school level, with the purpose of entering the ideal university, the purpose is to learn various "useful" subjects without distraction, and after entering the university, it aims to find the ideal job, strives to move closer to the professional direction of "useful" and "good employment", takes entering the workplace after graduation as the dividing line, and the "fate" of the university suddenly stops, becoming a "social person" without compromise. In such a linear logic, the university is nothing more than the "excessive etiquette" in life, the incubator of "social people", the "Meng Po soup" from the student era to the workplace, and the "lowercase" university. However, in Yoshimi's view, both 30- and 35-year-old professionals and retirees in their 60s should be given the right to "make the most of the experience they have accumulated and bravely challenge new paths" and even "break their own inherent values and strive to build a new foundation of intellectual imagination." Universities should be repositioned in life because "in the modern society that has completed industrialization", the inherent "linear timeline" of "academic years", "age groups", "working years" and so on has gradually collapsed. At the same time, "society's own timeline has become more fragmented and more mobile." In this case, universities should also "allow multiple timelines to coexist" to make knowledge acquisition and knowledge production activities of all ages in society more flexible and abundant. This is the "capitalized" university.
On April 12, 2022, local time, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, held a new student entrance ceremony at the Budokan in Tokyo.
Return educators
Professor Yoshimi is an excellent scholar, but first of all, he is an educator with a conscience, a sense of responsibility, and a concern for his students. In many of Professor Yoshimi's academic works, a suitable "time" is selected to insert content such as "thesis writing method" and "classroom practice method" that is directly "useful" to students, and this book dedicated to university education is no exception.
In the last two parts of the fourth chapter, "Three Years of College in Life," Professor Yoshimi turns his attention to university classes and essay writing, which involves the author's personal experience. Mention "Attack me!" This course, although Professor Yoshimi modestly calls it an "active learning model," is much more than that. We can often see rational academic debates among scholars in academic journals or academic conferences, but it takes great courage to dare to allow students to criticize their existing views from an academic point of view in the classroom without scruples. As the book says, before class, professors will designate a book or a paper of their own or others as a "Pre-reading" assignment, so that students can fully read and think, and then challenge any of the "empirical appropriateness", "theoretical integration", "conclusion usefulness" and "research background assumptions" in the classroom. However, these objections must be "high-quality", and they must have several elements such as "where", "how", "why", "how", "how", etc., in order to be qualified questions. The "attack and defense game" of "student attack" and "teacher defense" in this course can make a student who is not fully prepared and unable to ask effective questions and waste time to feel self-conscious, and can also urge teachers - but also scholars - to put themselves at the forefront of academic research at any time, and can not have the slightest fluke psychology of "eating the old book" and "fried cold rice".
The "Thesis Writing Method" provides a timely and "useful" guidance for students who are troubled by academic thesis and dissertation writing. The opportunity to propose this part of the content lies in the "usefulness" of the "method" of the liberal arts in "thinking and summarizing things through one's own strength and conveying the conclusions to others." Unlike the "experimental team" form of science, the study of liberal arts is mostly centered on "research group meetings". "Research group meetings" and "thesis writing" are the "methods" of "the fundamental elements of liberal arts knowledge production". Professor Yoshimi first proposed the "five elements" of thesis writing (the author's questioning, the academic methodology, the empirical arguments, the integration in the form of articles, and the deepening of understanding) and the "six steps" (clarifying the problem awareness and research purpose, identifying the research object, critically discussing the prior research, establishing the analytical framework - that is, hypothesis, conducting fieldwork, etc.), and making conclusions and evaluations). Here Professor Yoshimi gives a counterexample, and this is exactly the mistake that the author who was a student at the time made, that is, he mistakenly regarded his "interest" as "problem awareness", tried to cover a wide range of research topics in a paper, resulting in insufficient concentration of arguments and confusion of ideas, and the combing of the previous research was limited to listing and neglected criticism and thinking. Seeing my experience in the writings of my former instructor in the form of "negative teaching materials" is on the one hand deeply ashamed and on the other hand, I am also very happy. In the enlightenment phase of his academic career, preconceived misconceptions were able to be correctly guided, thanks to the timely correction of Professor Yoshimi.
From speaking out for the "liberal arts", to re-examining the way "universities" should exist, to returning to the front line of education, "The Impact of the Abolition of the Faculty of Liberal Arts" explores the grand issues related to the future development of higher education, academic research and young people throughout Japan. From this, we can see Professor Yoshimi's sense of mission and responsibility as a first-hand witness to the transformation of higher education, a participant in academic research, and an elderly person who cares for young people. I hope that all readers can get some gains from this book, trigger some thinking about the future development direction of China's higher education and academic research, and hope that you can give valuable suggestions to the translator's immature and imperfect translation.
(The author is one of the translators of "The Impact of the Abolition of the Ministry of Liberal Arts", a Doctor of Literature, a master supervisor, and an associate professor of the Department of Japanese Language at the University of International Business and Economics.) His research interests include japanese intellectual history and Japanese culture. His translations include Kunio Yanagida's "The Road to the Sea" and "About Marriage". ）
Editor-in-Charge: Gu Ming
Proofreader: Ding Xiao