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The most important goal for education is to teach people how to educate themselves. Every country has its own education system, which shoulders the responsibility of nurturing talents for its society. In spite of the different cultural backgrounds, there exist some common goals for education. Some may argue that the most important is to teach people self-education, while I believe this is not the case. It is true that self-teaching is of high necessity after students step into society, since they cannot always take lessons in school to acquire new knowledge and modern job market has an increasing need for multi-skill workers. However, it is not fair to say that it is the most important goal for education as long as we realize the fact that learning, the process itself, shows students the steps of grasping new things. Thus learners will naturally observe and experience how to educate themselves. Apart from this, education has other aims that are of equal or greater importance.
Individually speaking, critical thinking is what people should equip themselves with through education. Different from self-teaching, we will never grasp this skill without conscious training. Either in life or at work, critical thinking gains its importance due to the complexity of society and interpersonal relationship. This is not to say that everything needs to be criticized, but we should view things from both sides, the bright one as well as the dark, thus avoid being prejudicial and even make irreparable mistakes. We will understand that even though the present education system of primary and middle schools in the U.S. has some drawbacks, it does ensure most low-income families could afford the tuition fees, giving their children a chance to change their life. We will realize the necessity of the large funding in high technology, notwithstanding distance from our life. Think of the smart phones, laptops and green cars, how could they become even possible without millions and millions of governments' financial support?
Socially speaking, proper supply of talent in the workforce is another essential goal of education. Graduates will finally hunt for jobs, vocations commensurate with their abilities and majors usually being the first choice. So it is the responsibility of our education system to provide suitable and enough majors in the very first place for students to choose. In order to better prepare students for future work, schools should offer corresponding internship and hold professional contests other than classes. Some may argue that in modern society, people could read books and search for online material to learn working skills at home, so school is no longer the only necessary place to go. However, what the present job market needs are interdisciplinary talents and it is hardly likely that people could learn all the required skills all alone, nor is it possible that they have the expensive equipment at home. For example, in China, each university has enrolment number limit for different majors and major transfer system to avoid applicants being too crowded for some departments while other majors may even have no applicant. Each year, the government distributes billions of dollars to schools to renew and purchase the cutting-edge equipment.
To sum up, to teach people how to educate themselves is one goal of education, but not the most important one, because there are other aims which are of equal importance, two representatives being the cultivation of critical thinking abilities and proper supply of talent to the job market. |
