This article is my response to the following question:
What do you personally think is the aim of education?
One can write a whole book to talk about the aim of education. I would like to talk about three aims of education. Education helps people develop their independent thinking ability, build good morality and foster their sociability.
First of all, education gives people access to infinite knowledge, but also develops people’s ability to learn and think independently. Gaining knowledge is one of the purposes of education, so is being an independent thinker.
Secondly, teachers/instructors/mentors/facilitators guide learners to develop good moral qualities, such as politeness, modesty and respect. For instance, there are morality classes cultivating young learners’ morality in most Chinese public schools. Sometimes, even teachers themselves can be good moral models for their students.
Thirdly, studying and socializing with a group of people develops learners’ communication and interpersonal skills, and helps them fit in the society better. In our interrelated and multi-culture society, we learn how to get along with others from schools and from our life experience.
The discussion with educational leaders this week gives me a deeper understanding on the aim of education. On second thought, my previous thoughts on this topic are more like “the aim of schooling” than “the aim of education”. I would like to share some reflections and extend some points of my previous ideas.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. ------Aristotle
Two quotes which were shared by professor in class leave me deep impression. One is said by Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”. In my opinion, an educated person has an open mind towards new and various ideas. He/she may be an expert in one field, but he/she is also quite aware that there are a lot of things he/she doesn’t know. He/she doesn’t have to agree with others’ thought; he/she just listens to their reasoning, embraces it, and balances the merits and flaws by an internal process. In my past experience, I have found that most people who play a leading role in an organization always encourage others to question or against their ideas. It doesn’t mean that they have to accept the new thoughts. In one way or another, it often sparks more and more great and creative ideas. Education gives people an open mind and enables people think independently. Like UBC’s tagline, it’s “a place of mind”, so any valid ideas are embraced and encouraged.
Education is what remains after you have forgotten everything you learned in school. ------Einstein
The second saying is said by Einstein, “Education is what remains after you have forgotten everything you learned in school”. In China, teachers plan the class teaching aims in three progressive dimensions: knowledge and skills, process and methods, and emotion and values. The first one (knowledge and skills) is the basic aim of a class and usually easy to accomplish and test. As for achieving the second and third aims, it is often very hard for the teachers to tell. We might question ourselves: we learn so much knowledge on several subjects at school, but after leaving school for years, most of us forget the distance from the sun to the earth or have no idea how to figure out a calculus problem. Then, what on earth have we learnt at school? Let me give a clumsy example. Education is like eating food. Some kinds of food appeal to our appetite, while some are among our dislikes. At the end of the day, most of the food we eat becomes waste and excretes from our body. But there is some that has become a part of our bodies, our fresh and blood, our nutrition and strength. We internalize the knowledge and the skills and make them a part of us. I think this is one of the aims in education.
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
------ John Dewey
An independent mind, internalized abilities, good moral qualities and communication skills (which I mentioned in the in-class version) are what education leaves inside us. People gain them without knowing it. John Dewey said, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” Ultimately, education helps people become who they want to be and to live the life they want.
© Wenyi Gong 2017
Commentaires