The Aims of Education 教育的目的

The Aims of Education

Culture and knowledge are imparted through the process of education. Therefore, education is an eternal topic being discussed not only between nations but also families. Being reformed over and over again, the pattern of education put on new style and change a lot, which leads to the departure of the aims of education. The aims of education should focus on equipping the young generations with practice knowledge for their application of their future lives.

Education should focus on cultivating students’ taste, mold their character, influences their sentiment. However, with the development of market economy people nowadays turn to eager for quick success and instant benefits, and education has suffered from this distortional principle and become a distortional system. This distortional system seems only to make a well-behaved person with excellent knowledge in mind but without any moral integrity in heart. For example, Lin Haosheng, the student of FUDAN University, who has accepted great education in great university, was supposed to be a knowledge person while he murdered his roommate out of jealousy.

The education he received taught him lots of scientific knowledge instead of cultivating his moral sentiment, and leads him to murder his roommate with the army education offered him. This is a big issue deserved the whole society’s attention, for the aims of education should be reconsidered. The aims of education are guidance of morality, instruction of self-discipline, and teachings of knowledge.

Furthermore, education does not refer to the memory of rigid knowledge in book. Emphatically I do not mean, a person graduated from college only to find that he never know how to use a washing machine, and the dull knowledge in the book without any help. My point is that what is taught should be utilised, and what is utilised should – so far as is practicable – be stressed. That is to say, education also has to cover the practice of knowledge.

The aims of education are not only about the knowledge of book, but it is all about the development of ability. Knowledge does not equal to ability. Only when a person equips with knowledge and ability can he get well educated indeed. I am far from asserting that the aim of education is to keep the balance of knowledge and ability.