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What did you get from reading? Modern education = undergraduate general education+postgraduate professional knowledge.
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University education should be divided into two stages, the undergraduate stage with general education as the main part and the postgraduate stage with professional talents as the main part.
At the undergraduate stage, students should receive general knowledge, not just skills (liberal arts education in a broad sense). "When many smart, curious, compassionate and sharp-eyed young people get together, they can learn from each other even if no one teaches them. They communicate with each other, learn new ideas and opinions, see new things and learn unique behavioral judgments. " This is actually the essence of holistic education. In order to ensure comprehensive education, universities should not restrict students' majors, at least allow students to change majors.
It can be said that without a good general education, a person's career development will have no stamina.
After completing general education, you need to carry out 1-5 years of professional training according to your hobbies. This kind of training can be done at school, at work or after work.
With a good general education foundation and professional knowledge and skills, how far a person can go depends on two points, that is, his willingness to serve the society and his love for his career.
Johnny newman mentioned in "The Idea of University" that the ultimate goal of education is to cultivate people who have the ability to serve the society, and the university is a place to spread universal knowledge rather than skills.
Newman opposes the concept of higher education with narrow knowledge and lack of breadth, and supports the university education based on quality education that Oxford University has long adhered to. He emphasized the importance of gathering a large group of studious young people to live together, and should pay less attention to them academically, but they must be taught to pursue the virtues of nature, the knowledge of life, the credit of business, the ability to judge right and wrong, the taste of life and the contribution to the country.
In the world's most difficult Harvard Business School, there is never an exam. Students live, eat, live and play together. They learned as much from the professor. In a relaxed environment, they can freely acquire professional skills and social knowledge, especially the experience of dealing with people.
But this kind of education requires students to have high consciousness. Students admitted to the top private universities in the United States are eager for knowledge and active in learning. Generally speaking, they have strong learning ability, can quickly master professional knowledge, and don't be too heavy in their studies, so that they can have time and energy to learn basic knowledge and skills based on society.
Newman believes that a college student must have a wide range of knowledge and not be limited to a few courses in a certain major. Eliot, a famous educator, changed Harvard University from a teaching type to a learning type, and professors taught whatever students wanted to learn. If the professor is not competent, find a competent professor. That Harvard University, with only 6,000 undergraduates, can offer 6,000 courses.
To realize general education, schools should first give students enough freedom to choose courses and change majors. Among the first-class universities in the United States, most universities give students absolute freedom in the choice of majors and courses. College students choose their majors slowly after entering the school, regardless of departments and majors, and they can change their majors during their studies and graduate studies. Brown University and Duke University also let students design their own majors, and each undergraduate can have his own unique curriculum system.
Secondly, to implement general education, schools should have enough and extensive courses for students to choose from. In addition to offering 6,000 undergraduate courses, Harvard University also shares courses with the neighboring Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Smaller colleges of arts and sciences usually cooperate with top universities nearby to make up for their lack of variety and quantity of courses.
In addition, in order to enable students to communicate with each other between majors and fields and learn from each other's strengths, the balance of university disciplines is also very important.
Finally, in order to guide the communication between students, the college system of Oxford and Cambridge is the most effective. Students (including some professors) live in a small community with relatively independent external relations and close internal relations, and they are all members of a big family. Its purpose is to improve the relationship between students and professors, and to maintain this relationship in future life. In addition, teaching is conducive to helping students grow into social people.
Under the background of industrial revolution, william von humboldt brothers established a Prussian higher education system of "integrating research and teaching". In universities, teaching and research are carried out at the same time, and vocational education and skills education are the central tasks of universities.
When students are in school, they must have a deep understanding of a certain major, and the knowledge they have learned can be immediately applied to the country's industrial development and social progress, and they can serve the society as soon as they leave campus. In order to enable students to do this, many professional students need five years to graduate, and the last two years are completely studying very advanced professional knowledge.
The Humboldt University in Berlin founded by them has trained a large number of elites in philosophy, humanities, science and technology and engineering. Prussia quickly moved from a weak agricultural country to an industrialized power, unifying the German region. European and American countries and later China followed suit.
Humboldt's education system can cultivate outstanding professionals (whether scientists, engineers, lawyers or doctors) at the executive level, but it is difficult to cultivate leaders and industrialists with broad vision. However, it is almost impossible for a college student to complete general education and professional education at the same time by relying on four-year undergraduate education.
The second difficulty is the high cost of running a school. At present, only two universities in the world, Harvard and Stanford, have basically achieved a completely balanced development of all disciplines, and their professional education and general education are almost perfect. At the same time, they are also blooming in scientific research, which is maintained by huge donations and great academic reputation.
Thirdly, for those who have defined their major direction very early, such as Bill Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg, who dropped out of school voluntarily, they all think that it is better to do things as soon as possible to continue their education at school, because they have learned much more common sense in universities in this society than in universities.
Finally, general education and professional education are often contradictory.
According to Newman's general education concept, it is not important for students to attend classes and take exams. It is important not to set limits for yourself when studying. This requires schools to give students a lot of free time, allowing students to give them good grades without fully understanding the course (otherwise they have to spend all their time studying), such as Yale University and Harvard University today.
On the other hand, if students want to study deeply, they will spend seven or eight hours a day on some studies according to the principle of 10,000 hours for aliens, and have little time to do other things. In today's MIT, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge, because the courses and exams are more difficult, many undergraduates have to concentrate on their courses and exams, although universities have given students full freedom of choice and a lot of free time.
Gilman and Eliot, famous American educators, put forward that the only feasible way to give consideration to both general education and specialized education is to extend the education time and divide education into general education and quality education for undergraduates and specialized education for graduate schools.
Gilman learned from the advantages of Humboldt system and established the first graduate school in the United States at the newly established Johns Hopkins University, becoming the first research university. He divided higher education into two parts, combining elite education and quality education in undergraduate stage with professional education in graduate stage.
Eliot deeply realized the relationship between European higher education and economic development when he took the European exam, hoping to directly apply the inventions of universities to industry like Germany. During his 40 years as president of Harvard, he gradually implemented his school-running philosophy, changed the university from "teaching" to "learning", and combined the quality education of undergraduate courses with the professional education of graduate schools. He asked all students to choose some courses in several prescribed fields, and then choose the rest courses in their own academic direction. Geographically, he also separated various professional colleges and established relatively independent parks.
Taking this as a model, the United States has established a modern higher education system. Its undergraduate education is biased towards general education. Undergraduates have less professional knowledge, but much wider knowledge, rich social experience and stronger comprehensive ability (including writing ability, oral English level and scientific literacy).
Due to the lack of professional training, most undergraduate graduates either study on the job (the salary was very low in previous years) or enter graduate schools for further study. The purpose of master training is to enable students to master a means of serving the society and settling down. As long as they can "use knowledge", most universities don't need to do papers. However, most jobs in society only require master's degrees with short academic system and low professional skills, so the number of masters in many universities in the United States even exceeds that of undergraduates.
In the United States, the difficulty of getting a doctorate is very different. The requirement for a doctor is to "create knowledge" and contribute new knowledge to the world, while the doctoral thesis requires to make achievements that have not been made by predecessors (even a little). In addition, in the United States, both undergraduate education and doctoral education are losing money, and recruiting masters is a means for schools to make money. Therefore, for every university, as long as the master applicants meet the basic admission requirements, they will be admitted, while the doctoral applicants depend on how many people the research funds can support, so it is more difficult to enroll.
Finally, American higher education can lead the world today. In addition to giving better consideration to general education and specialized education, another reason is that after World War II, universities and governments cooperated to establish many high-level large-scale research institutes and laboratories, and a large amount of research funds were invested in them every year. Many large-scale scientific research projects of American government are put in these laboratories, instead of independent scientific research institutions owned by the government like Europe and China, which makes American universities become government scientific research centers. Today, many universities in the United States have the ability to independently complete large-scale national defense and scientific exploration projects, which is beyond the reach of other universities in the world.