ISSUE191 教育的取向——丰富个人还是培养工人？

TMACJAMESUID: 2836445

TOPIC: ISSUE191 - "Education should be equally devoted to enriching the personal lives of students and to training students to be productive workers."
WORDS: 688
TIME: 00:45:00
DATE: 9/4/2010 2:21:46 PM

1、教育激发人的潜力，所以能丰富自身，像文史哲这样的教育人的品行
2、教育给人们知识，而这时社会所需要的
3、教育是一个综合的过程，不能纯粹地分裂开

I partially concur with the statement that education has the function of enriching students' lives as well as training them to be efficient and qualified workers. Resorting to the nature of education, we can easily find that the statement has covered the two general aspects of education ----- emotional and intelligence ------ which both are the ultimate pursuit for educators. However, I doubt that those two general aspects can be simply separated into two equal parts or being put into practice harshly.

The education cultivates and triggers the potentiality of students, enabling them to fully develop their talent and forming their moral senses, which is an important task for any educators. According to Wikipedia, education contains the process of passing culture and knowledge from one generation to another. Thus during this process, people basically all come to realize the significance of people's potentials and talents, which with proper guidance could benefit the society at large. There is a famous recording in Chinese history about education that in the Jin Dynasty, a young man named Zhou Chu was once a troublemaker to his neighborhood, but after meeting two brothers who studies Confucianism, and received the apropos guidance in life, Zhou Chu then became a "Robinhood" person who dedicated in serving the people and fighting with threatening animals. This story illustrates the idea that as long as one's talent and strength is guided properly and wisely, he or she could be something greater than they used to be. And this also stands for the meaning of enriching the personal lives.

Another vital role of education is to pass knowledge and skills over so as to propel the advancement of society. In a generally sociological sense, people could be treated as workers in the society, only with different duties. And a crucial task for the society is not to thrive, but to survive first. Hence, those stills and practical knowledge accumulated before have to be inherited by next generation. And this is education that carries such responsibility. Letting students know what has been achieved yet would firstly allow them to practice and produce conversantly in order to make a living, and secondly trigger them to fathom further on those skills and knowledge so to prompt their development. The most basic skill for social survival is the agriculture. The advancement in agriculture is remarkable from 200 kilograms per hectare to 1200 kilograms per hectare, supporting 6.5 billion people's living now. And such progress can never be gained without the education system.

Notwithstanding, although the two general task of education is both vital, it does not mean that the education should be equally divided. The education system is a complicated and sophisticated one that contains many categories and sections. Differing from students' age and professional field, the education should not be rashly separated by a mechanical standard.

According to the different period, there are various emphases in education. At primary and middle school education, the main point should be on cultivate and develop students' ability and potential that would affect them entire lives. That is why nowadays preliminary school and middle school have courses concerning about life value and moral senses, and courses like driving and building construction are seldom taught at that period, due to the lack of foundation or the improper timing. But for college students, who have already enrolled in their own fields, then emphasis should be on the work training, especially for those work-oriented fields like accounting and engineering. Yet for those humanities fields, training those students to be productive workers equals to enriching their personal lives because of the character of their fields. Thereby, even though the education contains both aims, there is no an utterly universal criterion guiding the whole education system.

Simply put, education is a crucial part for human society, which emphasizes both on personal aspect and the social function. By the general education system, the society should attain qualified and effective workers while the individual ought to receive fully personal development. Nonetheless, the general guideline cannot apply to any specific field without meticulous consideration, or chaos might happen and result in an opposite direction.