孔子의 윤리 상담에 관한 硏究

Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine Confucius’ ethics counseling and apply it to today’s school education as a strategy for more effective ethics counseling. In the field of education today, efforts are made more in psychological counseling for students with emotional disturbances than in ethics counseling for ordinary students. It is because of the belief that when students with maladjustment to school life or the offenders of school violence are left untreated, they will cause even more serious social problems in the future. In school education, an increasing number of middle schools are reducing the hours of the morality class, and the high school curriculum changed ethics‐related subjects from mandatory to elective courses. As a consequence, students have fewer opportunities for learning or ethics counseling to solve ethical issues that they face through their lives. Lack of autonomy and difficulty in interpersonal relationships lead to maladjustment to college life, and low moral empathy ability becomes a factor causing conflicts in marriage life. The purposes of Confucius’ ethics counseling are to help each individual find his/her human nature and to support society members to strengthen their moral empathy ability. The ultimate goal of ethics counseling is achieving an ethically ideal society in which every person is happy. For the ultimate purpose, Confucius promoted ethics counseling based on the naturalness of humaneness, and gave ethics counseling in consideration of the counselee’s personality and level. In addition, his ethics counseling illustrated desirable and undesirable dispositions through contrastive explanations about the words and deeds of virtuous and petty persons and, by doing so, presented the ideal image of humans to be pursued by his disciples. Thus, Confucius’ ethics counseling is considered meaningful in that it suggests a desirable direction for today’s morality teachers to follow in their ethics counseling.