Abstract: Multi-dimensional education via professional courses is critical to the cultivation of high-level talents in universities and institutes. As the introductory course of geology and its related fields, Physical Geology is mainly aimed to train students for basic knowledge, principles and thoughts of geosciences, and to inspire students’ academic interest. To achieve the educational goal of high-level geoscience talents in the new era, the introductory course needs to strengthen the delivering of the ideological thoughts in a political way, and to shift from the training of basic knowledge and stimulating of academic interest to the promotion of capability in both science and humanity. The Physical Geology course is thus to act as the first step to cultivate high-level geoscience talents. Teachers might make full use of the two core contents of the course, including the principle of ‘the present is the key to the past’ and dynamic geological processes, both of which are able to strengthen the students’ scientific literacy through the promotion on the innovative and interdisciplinary ability. The students can further be trained to show high-level of humanity, including the elaborative craftsman spirit, the global view and the developmental concept, through the delivering of knowledge such as the complexity of geological processes and the large geological spatiotemporal scale.

Key words: Physical Geology, the present is the key to the past, dynamic geological process, geological spatiotemporal scale;
craftsman spirit