新世纪英语修订版阅读教程（第3版） 第1册U5_课程思政补充材料.docx

Supplementary Materials for Values Education (课程思政)Unit 5 Care of the ElderlyUNDERSTANDING CHINESE CLASSICSRead the story below and discuss the following questions with your peers.Filial Piety: An Important Chinese Cultural ValueFilial piety (孝, xiào) is arguably China’s most crucial moral tenet. A concept of Chinese philosophy for more than 3,000 years, xiào today entails a strong loyalty and deference to one’s parents, to one’s ancestors, and, by extension, to one’s country and its leaders.In general, filial piety requires children to offer love, respect, support, and deference to their parents and other elders in the family, such as grandparents or older siblings. Acts of filial piety include obeying one’s parents’ wishes, taking care of them when they are old, and working hard to provide them with material comforts, such as food, money, or pampering.The idea follows from the fact that parents give life to their children and support them throughout their developing years, providing food, education, and material needs. After receiving all these benefits, children are thus forever in debt to their parents. To acknowledge this eternal debt, children must respect and serve their parents all their lives.The Chinese character for filial piety, xiao (孝), illustrates the term’s meaning. The ideogram is a combination of the characters lao (老), which means old, and zi (子), which means son. Lao is the top half of the character xiao, and zi, representing the son, forms the bottom half of the character.The son below the father is a symbol of what filial piety means. The character xiao shows that the older person or generation is being supported or carried by the son; thus, the relationship between the two halves is one of both burden and support.The character xiao (孝) is one of the oldest examples of the written Chinese language, painted onto oracle bones — oxen scapulae used in divination — at the end of the Shang Dynasty and the beginning of the Western Zhou Dynasty, about 1000 BCE. The original meaning appears to have meant “providing food offerings to one’s ancestors,” and ancestors meant both living parents and those long dead. That intrinsic meaning has not changed in the intervening centuries, but how that is interpreted, who the respected ancestors include, and the responsibilities of the child to those ancestors have changed many times.The Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) is most responsible for making xiao a pivotal part of society. He described filial piety and argued for its importance in creating a peaceful family and society in his book, Xiao Jing, also known as The Classic of Xiao and written in the 4th century BCE. Xiao Jing became a classic text during the Han Dynasty (206–220) and remained a classic of Chinese education until the 20th century.After Confucius, the classic text about filial piety is The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety, written by the scholar Guo Jujing during the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368). The text includes several somewhat astonishing stories, such as “He Buried His Son for His Mother.” The most serious challenge to the bedrock of xiao thought came in the early decades of the 20th century when filial piety and stories like those in the Twenty-Four Paragons were criticized for inhibiting young adults from making decisions that would allow them to grow as people or have their own lives. Some critics went so far as to denounce xiao as the source of all societal ills. However, in 1954, the renowned philosopher and scholar Hu Shih (1891–1962) countered an extreme attitude and advocated for Xiao Jing, and the tenet remains important to Chinese philosophy to this day.(577 words)（retrieved and adapted from 1. Filial piety, a concept integral to Chinese culture for millennia, has seen shifts in perception across generations. How do you interpret the principle of filial piety, and to what extent do you believe xiao (孝) remains a central pillar of Chinese cultural identity?2. As society evolves, the way we practice filial piety has changed to fit modern beliefs and lifestyles. Can you provide some examples of how the concept of filial piety has been updated to suit today’s world?APPRECIATING CHINESE WISDOM1. 家有一老，如有一宝。

Having an elder in your family is like possessing a precious treasure.In what ways are the elderly comparable to treasures? What roles do the elderly serve in a traditional Chinese family?2. 树欲静而风不止，子欲养而亲不待A tree longs for peace, yet the relentless wind refuses to cease. Similarly, a son aspires to care for his parents, but time does not grant them the patience to await his service.We are living in a fast-paced society where the pursuit of material success often overshadows our familial obligations, particularly toward our aging parents. How do you interpret the Chinese saying above? Do we have to achieve success before we can adequately care for our parents?。