Education

Last night, I got an Email from a net-friend, an undergraduate student. She complained that nobody gives her a map that she can follow directly after graduation, nobody points out where the next station should be in the future, and nobody cares for her at all. Between the lines, I can read her helplessness and fears. Who can help her? Her classmates? Instructors? Or our education?

Finally, I desperately found that she has been disappointed in her instructors and classmates, because she used the words 'selfish' and 'hypocritical' to describe her instructor, and 'individual' to describe her classmates. What happened in our education? Is that our original idea to nurture a puzzled student like her?

I was also graduated from college and I know the students well. The key point is that our education hasn't taught her how to navigate her own life with obtained knowledge. From my point of view, life is just like a multiple-choice test that means we have to constantly make decisions from birth to grave, so there will be plenty of time to choose jobs, choose careers, choose whole attitudes and approaches. Only God knows the consequence of every potential choice and no choice would be absolutely right or absolutely wrong. What we need are courage, thinking and judgment.

However, have we been trained to the multiple-choice test during our education? In fact, we have been arranged all along before graduation. Most of us entered kindergarten, primary school, middle school, and college orderly. There was no chance for us to make a decision for ourselves before our college lives. Lack of practice, we are going to have to meet a series of important decision-makings after the commencement ceremony, such as job, career, marriage, etc.

In my last academic year, I was ever fearful of the uncertainness in the future, but I knew that nobody could be the author of my future map but only me. Quickly, it never puzzled me because I thought I had made a lot of decisions for myself during my college life, which enriched my experience and encouraged me to meet any decision-making in the presence of change. For example, I had to make a lot of decisions independently to accomplish my tasks during both my part-time jobs and my service years in student association.

Anyway, as a person who had been given the luxury of an education, I was grateful for the chance to have explored many possible career avenues for the future. But is the chance given by knowledge in itself taught in class? That's only half of the truth. In my opinion, the education outside the classroom and textbook also plays an important role in drawing a map. Experience can get rid of the fear of decision-making and facing change, because practice can teach me what life is and how to navigate life.

Of course, I will try to remind my net-friend that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than she think. Additionally, I can try to tell her that she needn't be fearful of change in the rest of life because change is healthy. However, I still cannot offer a map to such a confused girl, and that nobody can do it for anybody else.

Under the planned economy, plan can do anything for us and we needn't decision-making in job, career and even marriage. The economy system is changed into market economy now, but the society hasn't yet caught up with this fact, including our education system. It is high time we work out some innovative plans to meet the new demand in modern society, to provide chances to students to do more practice outside classroom, to pay more attention students' healthy characters from a psychological angle, and to nurture them how to love their lives and encourage them to make decisions independently from the beginning of kindergarten.

April 20,2003