What do you want to change about your school
Talking of making an important change in my school, I’d like to suggest that our education system put more emphasis on the development of learning skills and applications of theories into practice instead of simply learning knowledge from books. The proposal is based on the reasons as follows.
For one thing, overemphasis on academic learning poses a threat because of confusing the purpose of learning. As school credit is usually considered the major criteria of academic learning, in a credit-driven school, one may try hard to learn simply for learning’s sake. In other words, college students tend to blindly cram their brains with numerous texts and formulas while do not have a clear idea of what they really want to learn, why they need to learn, not to mention how the things they are learning are useful to the reality. An example is way that common ESL students learn English: they may spend several years in reciting grammar rules, but can hardly utter an English word in front of a foreigner.
Another reason that causes me to make the suggestion is the requirement of today’s ever-changing knowledge economy time. With the increasingly accelerated pace of information explosion, one can hardly depend on knowledge from books that he or she has learned at school. Mastering learning skills and knowing how to apply the skills into practice are becoming indispensable than ever before. A recent survey conducted by educators shows that most students in our country lack the ability of using tools and solving problems compared with their counterparts in the United States. This informs us to take a serious look at our book-knowledge based education pattern.
In sum, it’s high time for us to give a touch on our education pattern concerning the narrowness of book-knowledge learning as well as the necessity of practical learning required by the contemporary world.
