Question Chinese education: WHAT EDUCATION MEANS FOR INDIVIDUAL AND COUNTRY?

自己在某个论坛写的英语作文。哈哈。发这上求指点。

Before I start my argument, I must express my apology for postponing this thesis due to my recent occupied schedule. J

When I was pursuing my B.A, many of my closest friends were majoring education, and I attended myriad educational professional curriculums including Education Principles (e.g. Introduction to Education), History of Chinese Education, History of Foreign Education, Curriculum Theory. And I was a Normal Student which means when I graduated I was certificated as a potential teacher and got a teacher qualification, but we had to finish some compulsory and optional lessons before being qualified, these are closely related with education such as Occupational Technology Education, Education Technology and so forth. These are my partial academic background of education, so I might be more familiar with education than others who are limitedly accessible to education and telling the truth, I contemn education major in China for several reasons but here I am going to demonstrate my questions about our country education throughout primary to higher education with countless problems and why we are building such an aborted education.

WHAT EDUCAITON MEANS FOR INDIVIDUAL AND COUNTRY?

Education is a breeding career. if we are talking about GDP and other indices of a country to judge its current status in world and its wealth and prosperity, we might inspect its traits at this time, but if we are talking about Education of a country we are inspecting its future. That may be the reason why education is so essential for a country to develop smoothly. Since education has its role in constructing a country, then we have to naturally ask what are we going to educate and how we should define being a literate person? When we are turning the page of Chinese education history, despite of many provident education theories but few of them were actually carried out. For example, Confucious said that we should teach students according to their own characteristics but our teacher are accustomed to teaching for majority and neglecting minority and many of them are tagged as troublesome students which are in need of extra assistance. Current education system are widely criticized by people as being exam-orientation, because our students have to exceed exams to get their admission to junior, senior middle school and college. The motivation comes from multiplex origins including society, parents, relatives, teachers and peers. As many people have argued, this orientation has certain deteriorating consequences. Firstly, teachers should have been obligated to spread knowledge that in students’ interests and could urge them to explore and find the truth in their own eyes. However, teachers are teaching those knowledge to pass various exams which are stable but lacking flexibility and stimulation. Secondly, what are parents in China mostly caring about? Maybe, it is their children’s grades, after an exam, they are never tired of asking their children to talk about their scores and if the grade rise sharply, they would burst laughing to tears, if not, it would be a purgatory for the kids because they might need extra tutoring which would definitely squeeze their constrained leisure time. Thirdly, most of questions are open to answer, there are not any unique and everlasting answer, but exam needs standardizing, which might strangle children’s imagination and creativity.

Some of the antagonists might argue that if we abolish exam, especially admission exam to college, those poor and underdeveloped areas students would never have an another chance to change their fates. Admittedly, this is a crux to confess that our country’s social caste is fairly ossified and average people can hardly step to the top. Fortunately, this exam offers an opportunity for them to alter and move further because chances that could transform their lives are rare. And we have to admit that exams are necessary for education but nowadays we are overly emphasize its power and overly too much. This stress of exam is not a prior condition for successful education.

So let us think about what education means for individuals and our country. Education always means better and development. Do our students are being better and more developed in their mental and physical state? Entering a college is not an end but an access to their life goals. In other words ,if they want to be a hair designer or a fashion designer, do they need to go to college and pay large sum of money to waste their youth lingering in universities? We always tell them to do what we want them to do instead of what they want to do, but it is what they want to do really means about their future rather than ours. We are in short of leading and offering their a platform to ask their inner heart what they would like to do when they grow up. This is a prior and essential question in Japan and many other western countries, and their parents would not despise if their children choose to do more fatigue and “ignominious” job, but our parents could not accept. This initial distortion of goals also cause many consequences including obstinate boring with study and lacking motivation to cope with difficult learning challenges.

After being educated throughout our primary, junior middle and senior middle school and receiving admission to universities, our fresh men are totally refreshed and relieved from this purgatory and could be their masters wasting their most valuable youth time. It is not uncommon for colleges students drop out classes, playing computer games, watching videos, cheating in final exams, plagiarizing other scholars’ work as their homework or degree dissertation. Some of them said that finishing a paper is like copying and cluing by a click of mouse. We can hardly imagine what they could learn after their graduation. Maybe it is how to deceive, how to be indolent instead of being caught. When you ask them, what can you remember about your professional knowledge, they would say nothing at all. They are really our country’s future, and nucleus to construct our country who are sophomoric. Could we rely on them and bet our future?

College period must be anyone’s precious time to learn and mature, but in China, this is a channel to vent their long-strained pressure. In this sense ,our education is terribly incoherent and all we should do is to connect different period of education to breed capable and obligated citizen.