0910G【Try Best】第二小组 issue99 by tianshi02

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In our society, there is a commonphenomenon that people are tempted to be pragmatic as opposed to beingidealistic. I can’t agree more with the speaker that pragmatic behaviorguarantees survival. However, in whatever field, the importance of idealism can’tbe exaggerated.

In most fields, people are unlikely tosurvive without pragmatic behavior. In the field of academics, students areconsidered pragmatic when they try every means to get a higher grade in the assignmentsand only learn what is tested in the exam so that they can survive the currentsemester. Idealistic students tend to learn in depth the topics that interestthem and may overlook some important points in the syllabus and thus performworse in the exams. In addition, the pragmatic researchers focus their effortson the practical problems and never worry too much about their academic values.Those problems are usually easier to solve and could bring considerable benefitsto human society, companies or profit-making organizations. The pragmaticresearchers are more often than not better off than those researchers who aretrying their best to solve the hardest problem in their field. It’s not hard toimagine what a physicist would end up with if he or she spends his/her entirelife calculating where the God resides. Likewise, the political leaders wouldnever be successful if they only work on making the world an “ideal place”,while never bothering to maintain a good social connection with other leadersor never canvass a district for votes. Pragmatism seems to be the fundamental propertyin the business world. Minimizing costs, maximizing profits, getting the jobdone by the deadline and so on are something inescapable. If the leaders of acompany are talking about reforms every day and never care about thoseessential issues, failure is waiting for them.

Crucial as the pragmatism is, it cannotalways supercede idealism, which often serves as a guide to the way to success.It is certainly true that students are not good students without good GPAs, buta good GPA is not sufficient for a good student. One can attain a good grade bystoring the information that is likely to be tested in the memory and processthe information during the exam. Without original and creative thinking, whichare thought to be the idealistic behavior, how can they take advantage of thatinformation? How can they produce new knowledge out of what have beenmemorized? The goal of education is certainly not training students to becomputers. Rather, it should induce student’s initiatives to learn and to makefull use of their knowledge, which is supposed to have nothing to do with thegrade. The pragmatic behavior alone might undermine this fundamental goal,without the proper guide of the idealistic idea of learning. When it comes toresearch, the idealistic ideas are illuminating the entire academic field.After all, research is all about exploring the unknowns. Here is an exampledemonstrating the importance of idealistic ideas. Non-deterministic TuringMachine (NTM) is a computational model put forward in 1930s by the founder ofthe computer science field - Alan Turing. The problems that can be quicklysolved by this model are still not proved to be achievable by modern computers.In the past 7 decades, there have been numerous brilliant computer scientistswho are persistently working on this most mysterious open problem but end upwith failure. Even though they fail to solve this particular problem, theirefforts dramatically boost the development of computer science. Guided by thisideal, they by accident found some powerful computational models, such asprobabilistic and quantum computers. Pragmatic researchers wouldn’t work onthis impractical problem, and there would be no progress if there are noidealists. This is nowhere more true than on the point that idealism isindispensable for success. In politics and social advance, idealism is assignificant. Nowadays, people generally accept that women have the rights toread and work, just as men. However, this is not the case 200 years ago. It wasthe ideals of the feminists that made this change to occur. Without this idealand with only pragmatic people, how would this transformation take place? Besides,upheavals in history were in most cased, if not all, led by the idealistsembracing a better state of the society. Without a firm ideal, how could theyfight for their needs and eventually succeed at the cost of blood? All in all,idealism plays a vital role to the success in any fields.


Pragmatism does not fundamentally conflict withidealism. People in any realm of life, no matter they are students or politicalleaders, can focus on pragmatic matters while keeping in mind the fundamentalgoals and the ideals of their endeavors. Only in this way can they survive theimmediate challenges and achieve success in the long run.