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on differences of national education
We have been struggling to compete and survive ever since we came to this world.With all our efforts, we observe the surroundings, imitate others, and respond to the world with our cries. And that is our starts of learning.
As we can see, domestic education characters one. But school education never fades next to it, because we get to learn much more widely and deeply in the sea of knowledge, and to learn how to deal with different relationships and cooperate with others.
Above all, we must make it clear that the East or Orient means east Asia,including Japan,Korea and China while the West or Occident definitely consists of the USA, Australia and European countries in favor of independence. So we pick China and the USA as the representatives for each side, and that is what the following discussions are based on.
The nuclear spirits and profundities of education are deeply rooted in the culture and value system of the country, and that is why the education patterns are of grand difference between the west and east.
In antient times, most chinese people seek for an official career through their lonely and hard-working years of studies. They aimed to own social status and comfortable life from this path and live their final fantasy—to assit the emperor to administrate the whole country stable and puissant.Only when everything didn’t go smoothly or they were so disappointed, they gave it up and turned to the inner world to seek another kind of value of living and self-approval.
Things has not changed so much in today’s China. Avarage families hold a strong belief that fixing on education peseveringly will bring them opportunities to change their fates. That is to say, they believe high educational qualifications can easily bring their children a money-rolling job and upper social status.So there is a very consuming motive that arm parents with a strong sense of competition and urge their children to do their best with studies. As a result, every suspect of lures that may ruin kids in their minds cause a hate and even a fight. In my opinions, this can more or less explain that why generally those childhood dreams of atheletes or artists come to a premature-end. The concerns of parents come from the actual state of affairs in our country: with an incomplete system of social security and welfare and a large population of more than 1.3 billion, how dare they to take risks to encourage their children to focus on their interests that won’t bring them a job? What’s worse, as the quota of entering colleges are expanding at an amazing speed each year, the depreciation of diploma have caused the surgeFirst, make a living; then, others.
As we turn to the USA, we will find teenagers seem to be absent-minded about their studies. They don’t go in for memorizing mathematics formulas or spelling difficult Latins, but unlike us, they don’t have to force themselves to study, nor do their parents force them to. They can choose to become what they want to be, and their parents won’t strongly argue against that or simplely snuff out the dim possibilities. Rock stars? Super models? That’s fine, because you won’t be to blame to death or starve without a job if you couldn’t finally win your stage. A thin piece of diploma cannot determine your whole life, and there is nothing that can get your life done once and forever.Generally speaking, they are not urgent job-hunters like Chinese graduates, but they have their both individual and similar aim—building up their own career or live their own American dreams.The mature economy and social system allow much more possibilities of the youth.It is the fact that we cannot deny to admit.
Apart from aims to study, we come cross a more influent factor behind the differernt patterns of education—that is the traditional culture and nuclear value system in the country. The Confucianism has occupyed the most important position in the field of philosophy for more than two thousand years in China. “Learning without thought is labor lost”reminds each of us of importance of balancing learning and thinking. Ceremonial rites and regulations which it favours most are regarded highly that students are put in order by the schoolrules and the ethics exert a subtle influence on the youth to show respect to the authority, even a blind belief. That obviously has limited their imagination and creativity, which lead to their inertia to seek for a standard answer to every problem.
Generally speaking, the eternal and ultimate aim of education is to gain knowledge and to get high marks or straight A. As a result of that, the common methods of study is to memorizing and exercising round and round. The old saying works much under this pattern: practise make perfect. Although the traditional pattern has been criticized for many years, the positive effects on basic education truly exist and help our students who go aboard for further studies have an advantage over the native ones. But there are negetive aspects that students under this kind of pattern lack experience of practise and cooperating and ablities of handling problems and figuring out approaches independently.Their eyesight are not as wide as the western students as well. In addition,the evaluating system attaches importance to the result instead of the process. Also that is why the education pattern in the east is called “examination-oriented education system”, despite examinations are adopted in both east and west. As we think much of results, students are seeking after high marks at all costs and ignoring to develop their real interests. Since the curriculums are fixed from primary schools to senior schools, we are told to adapt them. We don’t have any preference and alternatives. But when we go to college, we are so puzzled and upset because we have to choose our own ways to go on. It’s horrible because we have got used to having everything planned or arranged by teachers or parents. And now the responsibility are handed over all of a sudden. Moreover, students easily get contented with what their have learned, lacking curiosity and creativity to learn more and broaden their eyesight. At the same time, they cannot find a relible and firm source of confidence and the grades become kind of peacockery.
Out of the dichotomy of the East and West, there is some cliche: the oriental prefer inducing ideation while the occidental prefer deducting ideation; the oriental develop relationships while the occidental favour independence; and so on. As the British author Rudyard Kipling said:”Oh,East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”It seems that these two civillizations differs such a lot that they cannot be attempered at all.
As we can see, the curriculum are similar and the way of teaching and testing are resemblant, so why do the students perform so differently？Since they walk their first steps, they begin to discover the uncharted world, trying to feel it, think about it and understand it. Kids build up their logic ideation on touches with the real world instead of abstact learning. They don’t have to memorizing poems or the multiplication table and their incomprehensible behaviours are not being corrected or stopped. During the school years, they don’t have much pressure as we do. They have freedom to develop interests and walk on their own ways. As a country of advocating freedom and independence, the youth are brave and bold to put forward their opinions and seek after their American dreams. Teachers are more considerable and tolerant as they regard students as friends as well as citizens. They don’t have a sense of superiority over kids. There is equaliness instead of rating. Besides, the homework are not the same as what we do for years. They have been asked to write paper or do presetation since early age. The process of homework train their skills of collecting, filtrating, and promoting information; and it also help them to reason and to express their ideas. But this kind of homework have been introduced to us in the past few years, it isn’t working effectively as we expected.
Beauideal never exist in the real world. With a open and free attitude to education, the nation do have several problems: The rate of drop-outs keeps high each year. One out of five to ten drop out of school in a avarage class during one term. The phenomenon is beyond our wildest dreams. The fact is that education doesn’t occupy a very high position in their culture. They admire those self-mademan who are not normal-educated much more. Apart from that, the absence of classes shows up frequently for all kinds of strange reasons. A teacher in charge of one junior class complains there are always four to five grandpa “gone” each term. Troubles never come singlely. How much knowledge does an average student gain after graduating from high school? It is hard to say, because it mostly depends on yourself. In a class of advanced mathematics, there is some that don’t even know what fraction is. And generally speaking, most average freshman need to go to remedial classes for English and Math. Besides, they know little about the other countries and culture except American stuffs, even the history of Europe—where their ancestor used to live. As the development of mentality are considered most, they hate memorizing so much that any courses which need memorizing would be classfied as roting ones. As a result, students have amazingly bad memories like empty vases.
But we should clearly see that the top students in the two countries are much the same, regardless of quality or quantity. We cannot simply criticize American students for their sloth because the matriculate rate of colleges in the USA are much higher than ours.
Having so much comparison above, we can see the complexity of what we are trying to figure out, that is much more than these thin pieces of paper. As a typical oriental student, I confirm that we should hold the belief of importance of education and try some new changes to get our education pattern more reasonable and of toleration.