Admittedly, general education has its merits, but I think it is too early to carry out general education in an all-round way and should be treated rationally.
First of all, I want to introduce general education here. General education originated from the liberal education in Aristotle's time in ancient Greece. Its purpose is to cultivate knowledgeable generalists, let students freely exert their personal potential, freely choose their learning direction, set the direction for the growth of life, and make contributions to the progress of society and mankind.
Advocates of general education despise professors with professional knowledge, the most representative of which is what richard levin, a former president of Yale University and a world-famous educator, once said: If a student still has some professional knowledge and skills after graduating from Yale University, it is the biggest failure of Yale education.
When I first saw this sentence, I was shocked and thought that general education had obvious advantages over vocational education. But after careful consideration, I found that not all colleges and universities are suitable for carrying out general education like Yale, and the large-scale implementation of general education can not be realized overnight.
First of all, it analyzes the premise of richard levin's saying this sentence, and the object of his saying this sentence is all Yale students. You know, the students enrolled by Yale are all elites from all over the world. They already have extraordinary intelligence and are capable of doing all kinds of jobs in the future. In other words, no matter what industry Yale students will be engaged in in in the future, they will be among the best.
At this time, Yale should not train them in a certain field like ordinary professionals, but should cultivate their extensive knowledge, global vision and good communication skills to help them explore their potential and find their favorite career.
This is the purpose of general education, and it is natural for Yale University to advocate general education. However, most of the students in ordinary colleges and universities in China are ordinary people. Their purpose of going to college is to master a professional knowledge and find a good job after graduation. In other words, students in Yale and ordinary colleges and universities have different purposes of receiving education, so ordinary colleges and universities naturally cannot copy them.
In fact, the earliest liberal arts education has a strong class nature. Aristotle thinks that those slaves are not qualified for general education, and their purpose is to do heavy work, so they just need to master the skills of making a living. Only those elites are eligible for general education. This is why Aristotle denounced skill education very much.
What we have to do is to think critically about some incomprehensible remarks that we have come into contact with, and it is best to think from the perspective of the author of the speech, so that we can often make a more objective and fair evaluation.
Dr. Wu Jun, an investor in Silicon Valley, gave his own views on this issue in the book Knowledge, which can be described as grasping the essence of the problem at once.
He believes that a person who wants to jump from the lower level to the middle level still needs professional skills and the ability to create value for others, while the skills that want to cross the middle level of his own class are not so important. This is because they now need elite education, or general education.
He thinks that the current general education concept is good, but generally speaking, it is for those who need icing on the cake. After all, there are still many people in the world who need timely help.
After all, the country needs a large number of talents who can do some basic work, and the elite is still a minority. For the general public, skill education is still indispensable, but it does not mean that general education can be completely ignored.
It can be said that the quality of our future life will largely depend on the general education we receive. For the mastery of knowledge, I prefer to be broad and profound first. On the one hand, you can find more industries that you really love and are suitable for. On the other hand, we can look at the problem from a broader perspective, and our thinking will not be rigid.
The country is gradually weakening the professionalism of the knowledge learned in the undergraduate stage, and those more professional knowledge will only be exposed in the postgraduate stage. In addition, colleges and universities are required to offer some courses required by general education in order to cultivate all-round talents.
On the whole, it can be said that general education is a kind of "luxury" education, which is still far from the general public. Only when a country's education has developed to a certain extent can it be qualified to talk about the popularization of general education. If you can't even solve the problem of food and clothing, it's meaningless to talk about western food.