issue104

molly1984UID: 2123299

104.It is primarily through formal education that a culture tries to perpetuate the ideas it favors and discredit the ideas it fears.
11:25-12:36
To develop prosperity and stabilization, a culture need to make ideas that are healthy, constructive and supportive to the society and itself prevailing. I agree that formal education is still a major mean of indoctrinating ideas into people’s minds, however, since we are in the information exploding era, it is by no means the unmatched primary one.

We have to accede that formal education used to play an important part in inputting basic knowledge and values into children’s almost blank minds, and it is still an important mean civilizing people in the information stuffed world. About a certain issue, people instinctively incline to accept the ideas that go well with the knowledge already installed into their minds by education, while suspect the latercomers, especially when they are from a different culture or society. This is just why the Japanese government’s history textbook issue has always been indignation-triggering among Asian countries. By altering the textbook, the Japanese government are infusing the young generation a fake history in which the former government did nothing wrong. Once the education is completed, it will be much more difficult for the future Japanese to realize the evil of war and the crime the militaristic Japan has committed. It is true that one primary goal of formal education is to endow students with the ability of critical thinking, but surrounded by people all holding the same belief as yours, it is hard to conceive that things can be interpreted in a totally different way.

However, as the means of communication thrive today, information comes by countless sources; there are also other significant agents that can exert great influences on people’s ideas. The media, for example, plays a big role in the forming of common attitude of a society towards a certain issue: there can be different ways of reporting the same event: you can focus more on the voices you tend to support while pay less attention to the argument from the opposite side; or you can decide what events you want to report in details while others will just come with skeletons; you can also consult to experts whose opinions are influential to the audience during the reporting…Although for journalists it is a professional moral to be objective, nobody is expected to achieve the perfect. Therefore in this subtle way, the mass are influenced and take in the ideas and values that are propagandized by the media.

The law system is another significant factor that contributes in the decision of a society’s values. For most modern societies, the law is the sternest mean of regulations as it has the judicial system in assistant of carrying out the punishment; no one would attempt challenging it, and if something is written as a law, most people won’t even bother to think about its rationality. So as a rather effective mean of perpetuating and discrediting the different ideas, important notions are always made into laws so that they will be obeyed and passed on by everybody of the society since. In this way, laws perform its unique function in forming and regulating a society's ideas.

As a conclusion, in modern society there are many means for a culture to carry forward the ideas it favors and control the ones it fears, with formal education being just one of them. Though its effect and impact still remain fundamental, however, with the advancing technology of global communication, the formal education is no longer an unparalleled way in leading people's thoughts.

[ Last edited by molly1984 on 2005-8-23 at 17:34 ]