The Ontological Roots of the Meaning Crisis in Education: From Psychological Intervention to the Reconstruction of the Three-Layer Cognitive Structure

Abstract

The contemporary global education system is facing a profound `meaning crisis', manifested in the widespread prevalence of `Hollow Syndrome', academic disengagement, and a pervasive loss of a sense of purpose among students. However, mainstream educational and psychological paradigms tend to diagnose this crisis as a form of individual psychological maladjustment, attempting to resolve it through resilience training, career planning, or positive psychology interventions. This paper argues that the reductionist tendency of this psychological paradigm obscures the ontological essence of the crisis. Drawing upon Xusheng Zhang's (2026) three-layer cognitive structure theory of `Soma-Emotion-Meaning' and Dongyue Wang's (2009) `Progressive Weakening-Compensation Principle', this paper posits that the loss of meaning among students is not a psychopathological phenomenon. Rather, it is the inevitable consequence of a modern education system that systematically strips away embodied practices and emotional anchors, leading to a `hollowing out' of the cognitive structure. Meaning is not propositional knowledge that can be directly transmitted or cognitively internalized; it is an emergent structure rooted in somatic interactions and emotional schemas. When standardized testing, disembodied pedagogy, and algorithmic media collectively destroy students' embodied spaces and emotional ecologies, `meaning'--situated at the apex of the cognitive structure--loses its ontological support and ultimately collapses into nihilistic `hollowness.' By critiquing the limitations of psychological interventions, this paper calls for a paradigm shift in educational research from `psychological repair' to `ontological reconstruction'. It proposes a three-dimensional pathway for rebuilding the ecology of educational meaning: returning to embodied practices to solidify somatic anchors, deconstructing performativity to restore emotional authenticity, and generating a holistic sense of meaning through the interactions of `being-in-the-world'.