Wang Yangming's Twenty-first Lesson: Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" and Education

In recent years, we often see in the news that today's star has been arrested for drug abuse, tomorrow's celebrity has been arrested for prostitution, and I often wonder, these people are rich and famous, why are their spirits so lacking and need to stimulate life and spirit in such a way?

Maslow once divided human needs into five levels: physiological needs, security needs, emotional and belonging needs, self-esteem needs, and self-actualization needs.

Physiological needs are the most basic needs of people, it includes food, sex, clothing, housing, medical care, etc., most of the desires and behaviors of ordinary people in daily life can be classified into this level.

Security needs include life security, life stability, occupational and income stability, future security, etc., as well as institutional, orderly, legal and equality needs.

Emotional and destination needs: Emotional needs include the payment and acceptance of feelings; the need to belong is the need for family, neighbors, colleagues, groups, communities, organizations, etc., and it is also what we often call the sense of belonging.

The need for self-esteem can be divided into two categories, one is the need for self-esteem and self-respect, such as strength, achievement, ability, advantage, and self-confidence, independence and freedom in the face of the world; the other is the desire to gain the respect and awe of others, such as reputation, prestige, status, prestige, honor, etc., as well as the sense of dominance, importance, and influence of others and the world.

The need for self-actualization, generally considered to be the highest requirement in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, refers to the self-improvement, self-completion potential, and tendency of people to realize their potential.

In addition to these five major needs, Maslow also attaches great importance to cognitive needs and aesthetic needs.

The so-called cognitive need refers to people's curiosity and curiosity, that is, the need to know, understand, explain, and study people and the world; the so-called aesthetic need refers to people's feelings, appreciation, experience, and creation of beauty, including people's sense of symmetry, moderation, order, and perfection of things.

Because cognitive needs and aesthetic needs themselves have very rich connotations, and are inseparable from self-realization and self-transcendence, it is difficult to be placed where layering is needed.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs has the characteristics of succession from low to high. That is to say, before high-level needs can arise, low-level needs must be met; high-level needs can only appear after low-level needs are met or part of the needs are met. This is the same as the ancients often said that "the warehouse is realistic and knows the etiquette, and the clothing and food are sufficient and the honor and disgrace are known".

Maslow believes that physiological needs, security needs, belonging needs, and self-esteem needs belong to people's basic needs, which can be called "scarcity needs", while high-level self-realization needs (including cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, and self-transcendence needs) can be called "growth needs".

One of the reasons why today's Chinese society generally lacks high-level spiritual needs is that the overall level of social development is still too low, so that most people have to rush for food and clothing, resulting in lower-level needs always dominating. However, this is not the whole reason. Why?

If the general Chinese still generally stay in the lower level of the group because the "warehouse" is not solid enough, "food and clothing" is not enough, then why are the few people in society who get rich first, like the grassroots, always whirling around in the most basic needs, but they cannot produce higher needs - such as cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, self-realization needs, self-transcendence needs? This is because the excessive expansion of "scarcity needs" leads to the extreme shrinkage of "growth needs", forming a pathological value of "noble eyes and lowly hearts". Today, it is difficult to see people who pursue self-realization and self-transcendence, and even cognitive needs and aesthetic needs have gradually disappeared from people's spiritual world.

Taking reading as an example, according to the survey, the country with the largest reading volume in the world is Israel, with 64 books per person per year, 55 books in Russia, 40 books in Japan, 21 books in the United States, 14 books in France, 11.9 books in South Korea, and 4.35 books in China. The data isn't necessarily accurate, but you can think for yourself, how many books are read each year?

Books are the ladder of human progress. The Jewish people are the wisest people in society, mainly because of their importance of knowledge and education. It is no exaggeration to say that the contribution of the Jewish people to this society is probably not worthy of any nation. Einstein, Marx, Einstein, Picasso, Rockefeller... Many of the people we know well are Jews who have made great contributions to the world.

Why are the Jews so powerful? Because they are a people who respect knowledge and believe in the "supremacy of education". The Jews have two mottos:

It is better to sell everything than to marry a daughter to a scholar; in order to marry the daughter of a scholar, it does not matter if you lose everything. If the father and the teacher are in jail at the same time and only one person can be released on bail, the child should first bail the teacher. This shows the importance that Jews attach to education.

Chinese has always attached importance to education, but the current Chinese education has long been alienated with society and the times, to a certain extent, divorced from the essence of education, reduced to another sense of utilitarian activities. Today, almost all people are quite critical of China's "test-taking education" and "cramming education", and have been calling for "personality education" and "quality education", but most of the Chinese's lives are still around "lack of sexual needs", unable to realize the meaning of "growth needs" for life, if adults in a society do not know how to pay attention to their spiritual life and spiritual health, then what kind of "personality education" and "quality education" can we give children?