issue104, 发以前写的第一篇， 记得当时写了整整一天，汗
104 "It is primarily through formal education that a culture tries to perpetuate the ideas it favors and discredit the ideas it fears."如果一个文化想要它认为好的理念永世长存而摈弃它厌恶的理念，主要是通过正规的教育。
1．一种文化维护某种思想就是维护其存在的根基，教育并不是维护的主要手段。维护某一种文化现象和教育的本质相违背。
2．.用和法律舆论来实现这一目标
A culture always tries to perpetuate the ideas it favors and discredit the ideas it fears, because ideas are powerful two-side swords, which can sometimes support the culture, while sometimes topple it absolutely by destroying the main principle on which the culture is built. Formal education, however, can not be taken advantage to reach such aims. The education, formal or informal, has its solitary aim, its single goal——to transmit the true and to eliminate the false, which makes it unreachable to self-interest of anyone, or any culture.
Education is a course that welcomes critical attitude and skepticism, much the way science Advocates creativity, rather than that indoctrinates the students with the ideas favored by certain culture. Admittedly, when a novice engaged himself in a new field, he really has a lot of things to learn and can not treat things with skepticism. However, passive receiving in the beginning, positive accepting later. Once the beginner learns enough knowledge to have his own opinion, he will look what he has learnt and is about to study with critical eyes. As Aristotle once said: “I love my teacher, but I love truth more.” .It is through skepticism–confirmation—skepticism, education functions well, and consequently the truth comes out. So education is just like a sifter, which eliminates the ideas out of date and keeps the better ones, no mater whether they are favored or feared by the culture. For a up—to—date culture which agrees with the pulse of the times, education will really make the ideas favored spread and then prosper the culture itself; for a reactionary culture, on the contrary, education will either revise or even decimate the culture’s principles, not to mention perpetuate the ideas it favors.
There are two effective means by which a culture can perpetuate its agenda and quash the other ideas. One is the law. The legislatures figure out kinds of legislations to constrain the public, from which can be seen what is permitted and what is forbidden. Further more, the punishment involved entitles the law a sharp tool that discredits the ideas that the culture regards as reactionary or heterodox. For example, polygamy considered reasonable in the past is now forbidden by law in china. As people tend to regard as immoral and infeasible the ideas and behaviors that contradict the law, the idea of polygamy is actually eliminated. The other is the mainstream media, which filter into every aspect of our lives in the information times. The plays, the songs, the articles, and much other information we get from the mainstream media, are greatly influenced by the culture, and then greatly influence us. The influence is unperceivable but enduring, which can brings us conformity of ideas by publicizing the ideas the culture favors and ignoring even criticizing the ideas it fears. It is just like the stream flowing silently, powerless at the first sight, but shocking everyone by presenting in its bottom the conformity of the stones that used to be shaped differently.
In conclusion, though education does have relations to the ideas that acts as either friends or enemies of the culture, it is not through formal education, but laws as well as mainstream media that a culture tries to perpetuate the ideas it favors and discredit the ideas it fears.
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