【超越自我小组】第五次作业issue11-8月10日-马马马

yinhezhixinUID: 2318361

TOPIC: ISSUE11 - "All nations should help support the development of a global university designed to engage students in the process of solving the world's most persistent social problems."
WORDS: 548          TIME: 00:45:00          DATE: 2008-8-10 13:15:38

The suggestion that we need a global university to solve the world's most persistent social problem is a dream and I doubt that whether it would work even if we have such a university with all nations' support.

Since the world's most persistent problems such as hunger, shortage of energy, environmental pollutions, species extinction exist in almost every society. Some of them are caused by insufficient resource and unfair distribution among people; Some of them due to the side effect of technology. With the development of new technology, it is difficult to expect what would come in the near future. That is to say, new problems appear, and we can not expect to solve social problems at a time.

Even we admit that we need more cooperate among nations, it is always not easy for an efficient method to be taken by different nations. First of all, there exists misunderstanding because of various cultures. For instance, family planning-to limit the growing number of population on the earth, some counties introduce some measures such as one family should only has one baby, while other countries especially catholic countries believe such policy is improper since human rights may be violated and the God may be desecrated when taking this measure.  Without common understandings about the same problem, no efficient measures would be taken to solve the problem and even cooperating is impossible in some controversial issues.

So if a global university is built, the first trouble the school would meet with is a textbook. What kind of text book would be used, since different countries have different interests. How can students agree with each other on some persistent social problems with different back grounds and cultures? For instance, if we want to solve the problem of global warming which has brought trouble to so many people and animals on earth, we have to limit the number of greenhouse gases produced by factories and automobiles. However, this would interfere with the development of some countries, so they may refuse to do the same thing as other countries to solve this problem.

Similarly, I wonder if a global university can actually solve problems. Some one may argue that students can learn better about our social problems, and new technologies may be discovered to help to solve problems. And some students may become leaders of countries, which might help to solve our common problems. But these assumptions are unwarranted, since it is possible that more disagreement may appear among students as well. Researches can be conducted in any universities and there is no need for such a global university. Moreover, we are not sure that students who graduate from this university would play an important role in their counties and they would choose to cooperate with other counties.

Finally, even though we can expect suggestions from a global university when solving problems. Such suggestion is unwarranted. For instance, even the suggestion from the UN can not solve the economic problems in South America.

In sum, I believe that a global university is only a dream for us. To solve the world's most persistent social problems can not just relies on the little force of university. However, the consciousness of cooperate and the awareness of our common troubles are precious for us. And nations should not reject others when solving our common problems.