51. Education will be truly effective only when it is specifically designed to meet the individual needs and interests of each student.
time:忘了计时了,1 hour多点 words:581
Educators have quarreled for years about the very essence and the best mode of education; yet no universal principles have been achieved. As far as I am concerned, to meet the individual needs and interests of each student deserves considerable albeit not the only attention and emphasis.
Education plan specially designed for one student caters for his or her own tastes thus inspire his or her interests to the greatest extent. Different person has different innate talents. Only when he is in fond of that field, can he makes every effort to overcome all failures and obstacles on the way and still keeps his enthusiasm. How can a born artist drag himself out of beauty of colors and cast himself to the pool of confusing and burdensome math equations? How can a biologist with outstanding instinct of experiment use this ability to observe human behaviors and relationships in society? Education which only imposes knowledge on students but not care for their own interests would definitely destroy them. One purpose of education is to help the student to find what he likes and dislikes, to lead him onto the way, and to present him the joy of learning. And education plans specifically designed for different individuals can finish this task.
Moreover, in a broader meaning, respective education due to different students will be able to evoke their greatest energy in a certain field. Since this may contribute to a better distribution of human resources, it will also accelerate the development of our society. In the rapidly-developing world, it's quite hard to be an excellent generalist. The education specially designed to meet individual's needs greatly improves the individual's expertise level in some field. For instance, students in medicine college are divided into different majors and also doctors in hospitals are distinguished as surgeons, physicians, pediatrics and so on. An ordered arrangement with every member excelling one aspect will achieve incredible success. Take a professional soccer team as another example. It's ridiculous for a player to do well in all the positions to win the World Cup; nonetheless a wise coach makes different training plans for different players, no matter striker or defender or even goalkeeper. Only in this way a player can be a real soccer master while a team a champion.
However, to be more comprehensive, it should be pointed out that although different student need different education model, there does exist some knowledge and skills which are necessary for everyone. To be a qualified citizen and a healthy human being, one is required to have some understanding about laws, sciences and languages, no matter he has interests in them or not. For example, China and USA have different electricity supply system. A tourist who lacks the basic scientific commonsense will find his razor produced in America totally out of work in China. Indeed, knowledge like this should be included in everyone's education. I don't mean that every individual should have good dominance of words to be a writer like Hemingway, but it's really difficult to imagine how an illiterate deal with so much information in daily life.
In sum, I generally agree with the speaker's concern about the importance of the specific education designed to suit different individual. At the same time, this attention should not go to another extreme of eccentricity since we also need common sense which doesn't need to be specifically designed in the name of a better education. offers both a sound base and an illuminating guidance.