For nearly a week, I didn't go to the school building, hidden in dorm, fighting for future........
TOPIC: ISSUE191 - "Education should be equally devoted to enriching the personal lives of students and to training students to be productive workers."
WORDS: 539 TIME: 0:40:11 DATE: 2008-3-27
Should education be equally devoted to enriching the personal lives and to training students to be productive workers, as the speaker asserts? In a sense, I agree with it. However the speaker begs the question by overlooking the critical role of the personal choice and unfairly gives the equality of them. Both of the two functions of education are important for the whole society's well-being and development. And the attitudes we have to them are crucial for our future. In my point of view, an all-sided consideration should be taken before deciding the precedence.
One of my agreements with the speaker is that the education should be devoted to enriching the personal lives of students. Education should be defined not only as the traditional normal form in school, but a way of learning everywhere. Education aims at the enhancing the natural development of growing children, rather than nothing more than pouring information. Through out the nation and history, we have a lot of characters and want to share them with our children to make them have their own, such as honesty, fairness, fidelity to task, friends and family, personal responsibilities, belief in principles of liberty, freedom of practise one's faith, equality, and love of one's country. All the foregoing things are important for an individual's development, education is for the improvement of both one's morals and faculties. The history tells us, the decent persons who did get achievements are all in good qualities, and have rich personal lives. One should need look no further than President Lincoln, in his early life, he used to do a lot of jobs, a lawyer, a teacher, a farmer and so on, the real experience give him varies valuable treasure in the future life.
Another agreement with the speaker is that the ability of practicing is also playing a vital role in the development of society. The progress in the recent half-century period, all depends on the technology and science. The diversity of commodities, the providing material, the level of housing, the safety of drinking water, the availability of medicine and so on, in sum the life becomes more and more convenient and enjoyable. So to make people more productive is one of the objectives of education. In a case of John Nash, the famous mathematician, who produced the game theory, has get benefits from the school teaching, and therefore, he still works as a professor to teach other students in this academic area.
Notwithstanding the foregoing agreements, I disagree with the way of saying the function of enriching and training are equal. The precedence between the main factors in our society and life should not be indiscriminate to decide without considering the time and the space. For instance, if in the war time, the training function seems to be more important than any others, people should have skills to produce under the circumstance of lacking of commodities. So the education should be varied with the surroundings in a society.
In sum, the education's content is too rich in various aspects of our life to be sorted out or judged by any fixed standard. And the crucial role of it should be emphasized all the time throughout the history and the future anywhere and anytime.
