Post by Jordis on Nov 25, 2015 21:00:36 GMT
Education serves a great deal for human being's future, it's emphasized again and again yet never reach truly satisfying status.
As what I see and experience, "true education" can be done in two consistent parts: basic education and self-education.
First it's basic education, it consists of basically most of the subjects what every pre-college students must learn, because these are the foundation of their life-long development, it can't be ignored. As for what specific subject to choose, really depends. In China there're a lot of unnecessary subjects that are mandatory, such as "moral and ethic" class and "Politics" class, former teaches what is supposed to be taught by parents, while the latter simply is a tool to teach communism party's thoughts to direct or subconsciously control their people's mind ( which they pretty much succeeded). In China's case, we need to take these two subjects away, and put more emphasis on learning skills, training critical thinkings instead of training students to hit high score in exams. Taken away those redundant content that are forced on students, we probably can condensed the time period from 12 years to 10 years, so when a citizen reaches 16 years old he's supposed to be equipped with basic universal knowledge and understanding about the world and independent, critical thinking.
Second part is "self-education". So far, most university level study in the world is merely a extent to what it was like in school, students have to choose a specific subject and then under this big category they'll be forced to learn a lot of mandatory stuff again, of which mostly won't be useful at all no matter for their personal life or career. Therefore I believe students would be better off if university just provide them a place to study, without any mandates, don't tell them what they must study, because when you draw a circle for them, they might just bury their head in the small circle and never bothers to look outside. Another shortage of this kind of college education is, for example, ten economics students, must study the same courses to gain enough credit to graduate, but you can't guarantee that every course you designed for economics students fit every single individual student's own interest. Some may want to become a salesperson, but he had to study very difficult statistics, a student who wants to become a accountant has to study also tons of theories of management which they won't use at all. The best way to solve this problem is, to grant students the freedom to choose whatever course they feel like to attend, as long as they earn enough credit they may graduate, and on the diploma there should state what course he attended, in this way not only the student can really dig into what he's really interested in without distraction but also the future employer will be have a full comphrehension of what this student is interested in, what he or she is mostly trained in, what his main skill is. The university doesn't have to take the responsibility for the students, the students themselves must take the responsibilities, if a student chose only the easiest courses throughout his entire college experience, he will personally take the responsibility for not gaining any relevant skills for his ideal job and life.
System's talk beside, I'd also like to mention the format of the course, now due to the limit of reality, most university offers only large scale lesson in big hall, hundreds of students sitting there, some sleep, some take notes, some playing with phones, it's terribly inefficient. What really motivate everyone to be part of the course is a seminar format course, from 10 to 40 people, divided into groups, there'll be group work and collaboration, strong in-class interaction, teachers mostly conduct a conversation or discussion instead of endless monologue. This is what I experienced in my short one year study in Germany and the seminar course was the course truly remains in my heart, if you want to learn stuff, you must go through seminar, not listening to professor's monologue, no matter how wise and qualified the professor is.
At last, I want to say that e-learning is going to be the real future of education, it is flexible, students are self-responsible, interactions on internet is allowed (though not as good as sitting together to discuss but may bring more dedicatedly crafted arguments during discussion due to the nature of study at home). With all the tools we have today, everyone can train himself into an expert if he or she really determines to do so, it is a great time to live in this era, must say so. Hope main stream education can learn and adapt all the strengths of online learning.
As what I see and experience, "true education" can be done in two consistent parts: basic education and self-education.
First it's basic education, it consists of basically most of the subjects what every pre-college students must learn, because these are the foundation of their life-long development, it can't be ignored. As for what specific subject to choose, really depends. In China there're a lot of unnecessary subjects that are mandatory, such as "moral and ethic" class and "Politics" class, former teaches what is supposed to be taught by parents, while the latter simply is a tool to teach communism party's thoughts to direct or subconsciously control their people's mind ( which they pretty much succeeded). In China's case, we need to take these two subjects away, and put more emphasis on learning skills, training critical thinkings instead of training students to hit high score in exams. Taken away those redundant content that are forced on students, we probably can condensed the time period from 12 years to 10 years, so when a citizen reaches 16 years old he's supposed to be equipped with basic universal knowledge and understanding about the world and independent, critical thinking.
Second part is "self-education". So far, most university level study in the world is merely a extent to what it was like in school, students have to choose a specific subject and then under this big category they'll be forced to learn a lot of mandatory stuff again, of which mostly won't be useful at all no matter for their personal life or career. Therefore I believe students would be better off if university just provide them a place to study, without any mandates, don't tell them what they must study, because when you draw a circle for them, they might just bury their head in the small circle and never bothers to look outside. Another shortage of this kind of college education is, for example, ten economics students, must study the same courses to gain enough credit to graduate, but you can't guarantee that every course you designed for economics students fit every single individual student's own interest. Some may want to become a salesperson, but he had to study very difficult statistics, a student who wants to become a accountant has to study also tons of theories of management which they won't use at all. The best way to solve this problem is, to grant students the freedom to choose whatever course they feel like to attend, as long as they earn enough credit they may graduate, and on the diploma there should state what course he attended, in this way not only the student can really dig into what he's really interested in without distraction but also the future employer will be have a full comphrehension of what this student is interested in, what he or she is mostly trained in, what his main skill is. The university doesn't have to take the responsibility for the students, the students themselves must take the responsibilities, if a student chose only the easiest courses throughout his entire college experience, he will personally take the responsibility for not gaining any relevant skills for his ideal job and life.
System's talk beside, I'd also like to mention the format of the course, now due to the limit of reality, most university offers only large scale lesson in big hall, hundreds of students sitting there, some sleep, some take notes, some playing with phones, it's terribly inefficient. What really motivate everyone to be part of the course is a seminar format course, from 10 to 40 people, divided into groups, there'll be group work and collaboration, strong in-class interaction, teachers mostly conduct a conversation or discussion instead of endless monologue. This is what I experienced in my short one year study in Germany and the seminar course was the course truly remains in my heart, if you want to learn stuff, you must go through seminar, not listening to professor's monologue, no matter how wise and qualified the professor is.
At last, I want to say that e-learning is going to be the real future of education, it is flexible, students are self-responsible, interactions on internet is allowed (though not as good as sitting together to discuss but may bring more dedicatedly crafted arguments during discussion due to the nature of study at home). With all the tools we have today, everyone can train himself into an expert if he or she really determines to do so, it is a great time to live in this era, must say so. Hope main stream education can learn and adapt all the strengths of online learning.