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Introduction

The purpose of education is to free students from the slavery of reality, not to adapt to reality. Education should create conditions for promoting inner freedom and producing excellent souls and minds. If we just adapt to reality, what should we do with education?

——Zhou Guoping

What is education? What exactly is education? What are the most important principles in education? Excellent minds at home and abroad, both ancient and modern, have thought a lot about this and made many remarks.

I have found that the most pertinent and wonderful things to say about education often come from philosophers. If professional educators and educationalists do not possess the wisdom to understand human nature at the same time, what they say will easily be limited to experience, or stick to the details of psychology, appearing superficial, trivial and mediocre.

Now I will list the educational concepts that I admire most, *** seven points, we might as well call them the seven maxims of education.

They do have the characteristics of proverbs: they point directly to the essence of things, they are as simple as oracles and as simple as common sense. What is sad is that people are lost in the illusion of things, preferring to believe in all kinds of difficult and complicated fallacies and forgetting simple common sense.

However, those who are still simple will definitely feel that these proverbs are very relevant to the shortcomings of today's education, and how our education needs to return to common sense and the most basic principle of education.

1

Education is growth

Growth is the purpose, there is no purpose other than growth

This argument was put forward by Rousseau, and then Dewey elaborated further. "Education is growth" succinctly and concisely states the original meaning of education, which is to enable everyone's nature and innate abilities to grow healthily, rather than instilling external things, such as knowledge, into a container.

Socrates has long pointed out that seeking knowledge is an inherent ability in everyone's soul. The wise men of that time claimed that they could instill knowledge into the soul that was not there originally. Socrates scoffed, as if they could put sight into the eyes of the blind.

Understanding the principle of "education is growth", we also understand what education should do.

For example, intellectual education is to develop curiosity and the ability to think rationally, rather than instilling knowledge; moral education is to encourage lofty spiritual pursuits, rather than instilling norms; aesthetic education is to cultivate a rich soul, rather than instilling knowledge. Not instilling skills.

"Growth is the purpose, and there is no purpose other than growth." This is particularly against the use of narrow utilitarian standards to measure education. Even if people seem to admit that "education is growth", they must set an external goal for growth, such as adapting to society in the future, seeking a career, making achievements, etc. It seems that if they do not work towards such goals, there will be no growth. As if of any value.

Using utilitarian goals to regulate growth will inevitably result in suppressing growth. In fact, it still denies "education is growth."

Is growth itself valueless?

Isn’t a person whose nature has developed healthily both excellent and happy? Even if measured by a utilitarian scale, wouldn't such people be more likely to achieve real success in society? From the perspective of the situation of the entire society, as Russell pointed out, a society composed of men and women with excellent nature will definitely be much better than the opposite situation.

2

Children are not adults who have not yet grown up

Childhood has its own intrinsic value

Use external utilitarian purposes to regulate education , ignoring the value of growth itself, one of the most direct and harmful results is to deny the inherent value of childhood. It is a mistake to regard children as "a future being", an adult who has not yet grown up, who seems to have little value until he "grows up", and the only goal of education is to prepare children for future adult life. The concept has a long history and is widely circulated.

The very idea of ??"growing up" is ridiculous. As if children are not human beings until they grow up! Montessori first explicitly criticized this concept and established his child education theory based on determining the personality value of children. Dewey also pointed out that childhood life has its own inherent quality and meaning. It should not be regarded as an immature stage in life and just want it to pass quickly.

Each stage of life has its own irreplaceable value. No stage is just a preparation for another stage. Especially childhood, which is originally the most important stage of physical and mental growth, should also be the happiest time in life. The greatest merit that education can achieve is to give children a happy and meaningful childhood, so as to make them happy and meaningful. Create a good foundation for life.

However, the common situation today is that the entire adult world imposes its own small utilitarian goals on children and drives them to fight on the utilitarian battlefield.

I am worried that in their future lives and in society a few years from now, the consequences of the barbaric deprivation of childhood values ??will be revealed in horrifying ways.

3

The purpose of education is to free students from the slavery of reality

rather than to adapt to reality

This is Cicero’s famous saying . Today's situation is just the opposite. Education is doing its best to mold students to adapt to reality. When people live in society, it is of course necessary to adapt to reality, but this should not be the main purpose of education.

Montaigne said: Learning is not to adapt to the outside world. But to enrich yourself. Confucius also advocated that learning is a matter "for oneself" rather than "for others".

Philosophers throughout the ages have emphasized that learning is to develop one's inner spiritual abilities and thereby gain freedom in the face of external reality. Of course, this is only an inner freedom, but it is precisely by virtue of this inner freedom, this independent personality and independent thinking ability that those outstanding souls and minds have played a great role in changing the reality of human society.

Education should create conditions for promoting inner freedom and producing excellent souls and minds. If we just adapt to reality, what should we do with education?

4

The most important educational principle is not to cherish time

To waste time

This sentence comes from Rousseau. To many of our ears today, this is simply a fallacy. However, Rousseau had his own reasons. If education is growth, then the mission of education should be to provide the best environment for growth. What is the best environment?

The first is free time, and the second is good teachers.

In Greek, the word school means leisure. According to the Greeks, students must have ample time for experience and contemplation before they can freely develop their mental abilities.

Rousseau defended his shocking theory and said: "Misuse of time will cause greater losses than wasted time, and children who have been educated wrongly are further away from wisdom than children who are not educated."

< p> Today many parents and teachers are afraid that their children will waste their time, forcing them to do endless homework and not leaving any time for them to play, thinking that they have fulfilled their responsibilities as parents and teachers. Rousseau asks you: What is wasted time? Is happiness nothing? Isn't it nothing to jump and run all day? If satisfying the demands of nature is wasted, then let them be wasted.

When you reach college, free time is even more important. In my opinion, you can’t have good teachers, but you can’t have free time. In the final analysis, all education is self-education, and all learning is self-study. This is especially true as far as the growth of mental abilities is concerned.

I agree with John Henry's view: for smart students with basic education, there might as well be no teachers or examinations in the university, allowing them to browse freely in the library.

I want to sigh with Bernard Shaw: bookshelves around the world are filled with spiritual delicacies, but students are forced to chew through boring textbooks that are nutritious.

5

Forgot everything you learned in class

What is left is education

I first studied at Einstein’s I saw this sentence in the article, which was a witticism he quoted without naming him. Later I discovered that it was probably derived from a statement by Whitehead, to the effect that if you put aside the textbooks and lecture notes, and forget the details you memorized for the exam, only the remaining things will be valuable.

The details of knowledge are easy to forget, and once you need them, they are easy to look up in a book. Therefore, focusing on remembering the details of knowledge is both laborious and worthless. Suppose you forget all the things you learned in class. If nothing is left as a result, it means that your education was in vain.

What should be left that deserves to be called education, in Whitehead’s words, is a principle that completely penetrates your body and mind, a habit of intellectual activity, a kind of knowledge and imagination. Lifestyle; in Einstein's words, it is the overall ability to think and judge independently.

According to my understanding, in layman’s terms, a person becomes an incorrigible thinker or scholar from then on. No matter what career he pursues in the future, he can never change his habits and hobbies of learning, thinking, and research. Only then can we admit that he has received a university education.

6

University should be a place where masters gather

Let young people grow under the influence of masters

The true meaning of education is not to impart knowledge , but to cultivate the habit of intellectual activities, the ability to think independently, etc. These intellectual qualities obviously cannot be taught like knowledge. The only way to cultivate them is to be influenced by people with such qualities.

There are two places for masters, one is on the bookshelf of the library, and the other is in the university. The university should be a place where living masters gather. As Whitehead said: The reason for the existence of universities is to have a group of scholars who explore knowledge imaginatively, so that students can be influenced by them in their intellectual development and build a bridge between mature wisdom and the passion for pursuing life. Otherwise, universities It doesn't have to exist.

Lin Yutang has a more vivid statement: An ideal university should be a dining room for a group of extraordinary personalities. Here is a Newton, there is a Froth, there is a Russell in the east room, and in the west room is a Russell. A Lasky lived there, the front yard was Hui Dingzi's study, and the back yard was Dai Dongyuan's house.

He emphasized: "Eating place" is not a metaphor. These masters have no obligation to the school except for eating. The school pays them salaries to live on campus so that students can interact with them and be influenced by them. For example, the great professors at Oxford and Cambridge smoke their pipes and chat about life and knowledge, and the quality of their students is thus smoked out.

Today’s universities are vying to advertise themselves as world-class universities and have set various hard targets. In fact, the thing is very simple: the hardest indicator is teachers. A university has a group of first-class scholars with noble souls and intelligent minds. It is a first-class university. Otherwise, no matter how big the school building is, no matter how impressive the building is, and no matter how advanced the equipment is, it will all be in vain.

7

Teachers should regard students as ends rather than means

This is the principle prescribed by Russell for the correct teacher-student relationship. He pointed out that the essential quality of an ideal teacher is to love his students, and a reliable sign of love is to have a broad parental instinct, just as parents feel that their children are the purpose, and feel that the students are the purpose.

He emphasized: Teachers should love students more than they love the country and the church. Regarding today's situation, I would like to add: You should love money and fame more than anything else. Some teachers today take fame and fortune as their sole purpose and blatantly treat students as a means to gain fame and fortune.

Whether a teacher personally loves his students or not depends on the teacher’s character. To make most teachers in schools regard students as ends rather than means, an education system with students as ends must be established.

The main reason why the practice of using students as a means to achieve success is that teachers have too much power and have the power to decide the promotion and graduation of students.

Therefore, I agree with Einstein's suggestion: the power to use coercive measures should be given to teachers as little as possible, so that the only source of respect for students is his humanity and intellectual quality.

Correspondingly, it is to expand the rights of students, especially graduate students. Within the scope permitted by the syllabus, they can freely choose teachers and courses, and they can change their career and find a new career. Teachers should also be evaluated mainly based on whether they are loved by students, rather than favored by administrative departments. As it is now, if teachers have the ability to earn large sums of research funding, they have the power to recruit more students and have students work for them. Otherwise, they will be criticized or even deprived of the right to educate students. Under this system, There is no reason why students should not be reduced to means.

Source | China Education Thirty People Forum

Author | Edited by Zhou Guoping | China.com Education Channel

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