对于教育的定义

Behind the “Education” Rousseau, the philosopher of French Enlightenment, once asserted that education was intended for the breeding of liberty, independence and preparation for all walkings. Concisely, this definition underlays the main organs of this grand mechanism. At the very beginning of human’s literacy, we were simplistically taught to be able to read, write, and count—the whole picture has not been completed yet. The building stones of continuation of education are observation, thinking and implementation, without which the Renaissance, Enlightenment movement, Industrialization, the information superhighway, and the more and more digitalized world had remained just lengadaries in the worn-out books of divination buried in the erosion of time. Objective education lightens up the dark world towards aspiration for the new land. The traditional setting—circling children into a classroom, cramming them with mountains of equation and seas of poems—has kept telling us that education is just a one-way model of inputs transformed into outputs. Until a “ground-breaking” genius, Einstein, breaks through this seemingly well-functioning procedure: shortly before he being called to God was the one hundred anniversary of his old school, upon which occasion he conversely wrote an article about the evils of cramming education and confessed that he did not live up to the standards of “good students” who were required to comply with numerous rules and principles and compile all devotion on assignments. Fortunately, he wisely cast away these fetters, satisfied with moderateness, diversing his commitment to the mysterious natural world that took on the most appealing look to him. Had he ever sticked around the lifeless rules, we would have slowed down advancement of hundreds of year. At this point, besides infusion of basic knowledge, education plays an indispensible role of tapping out trainees’ potentiality for imagination, creativity and bold courage—those are the liberty, in realistic sense. There once was a contrastive experiment conducted between Chinese and American students about brainstorm. Both of them were asked to create more value out of 20 dollars in 5 hours. While American students were quick at working on novel ideas, Chinese students, tragically, were stuck in this seemingly difficult situation. The latter, without any freshment, used the set-up fund purchase some attractive stationery from wholesale businessmen, then sold it in a corner of dense population in the campus. Interestingly, the former ones employ a remarkably inventive way: they identified a problem common in college towns—the frustratingly long lines at popular restaurants on Saturday night. The team paried off and booked reservations at several restaurants. As the times for their reservations approached, they sold each for up to 20 dollars to customers who were happy to avoid a long wait. Impressively, the only cost of their program was a few telephone bills. Overall, the subtle difference of choices between two groups is not only about creativity; the most important of all, it concerns the independent thinking. We Chinese students universally are accustomed to exam-oriented education, which only expects compliance rather than independence out of students’ mindsets. We are often told to follow the examples from the books, but seldom have we been asked to set the examples by ourselves. If Steve Jobs excessively relied upon the previous achievement human have achieved and just did some upgrading work upon the foundation, nowadays there would not be a high-tech empire named “Apple”. Backed by this standpoint, education is the bridge that directs trainees to walk from the past to the self-controlled unknown. Creativity and independence, two simple words, yet two ultimate conceptions that underpin “education”, and also, the charming education has. PAGE 1