To survive through our educational system in Hong Kong is not an easy task for everyone, especially if the stress is to train “memory experts” with “endless tests and examinations” rather than educate the students with the purposes of the subjects that they can understand, evaluate, learn and use them in life with their own self-determinism.
If you ask anyone what the purposes of education are in Hong Kong, you may not be surprised that many people cannot give you the proper definition and purposes of education. Instead you will most likely get many similar answers like the reasons going to school are to prepare oneself to get a better job and earn a better living.
It’s nothing wrong to get a better job or earn a better living, but how can we achieve this? Can we achieve by training someone as a “memory expert” without duplication, understanding, power of choice of the received data, and knowing how to use it to achieve results in life? Our education is more geared toward “one way inflow of data to the students “ that one cannot easily challenge whether the text is correct or not, but all what one needs to know is how to relate the text to the examination questions. We can easily witness the failure of many graduates of good grade students in applying what they have learnt from school into life, and conclude that the talent of this generation is not so good as our earlier generation. But what has gone wrong?
Our culture is held together by how well we can educate our own people including whether we can educate valuable subjects that are useful, and whether they are taught in a way that the individual and the society see the purposes and the need of them, so to have a roadmap how to achieve the purpose by our education.
So it is time to ask:
1) What are the purposes of our education?
2) When studying any subject, do we have any purpose of doing this subject? What kind of results do we expect in acquiring and applying the subject in life?
3) How does the subject we study relate to ourselves and others? Is it valuable?
4) How can we evaluate the information on the subject to know the importance, relevancy, application and have our own opinion on the subject?
5) Do we have any effective study method (rather than memorizing method) to help us to achieve the above and know how to learn anything in life as one wishes?
I have been educated in both school systems in Hong Kong and the United States. I see that there is a lack of effective education and study methods thoroughly taught in our school systems. Most of the time, we simply jump in receiving the teachings of the subject without first consulting the above questions for ourselves and from our teachers; with the assumption that we instinctively know how to study and if any improvement is needed in this system, it will be the effort on raising one’s abilities in receiving or memorizing the data of the subject.
We are self-determined beings. For any information we receive today, especially in this new era of information age, our self-determinism is very much required in the evaluation of the information so we can use valuable information to achieve the goals or purposes of the subject to the extent of our own goals and purposes in life; and from which we can possibly have a prospering culture of our own.
If you ask anyone what the purposes of education are in Hong Kong, you may not be surprised that many people cannot give you the proper definition and purposes of education. Instead you will most likely get many similar answers like the reasons going to school are to prepare oneself to get a better job and earn a better living.
It’s nothing wrong to get a better job or earn a better living, but how can we achieve this? Can we achieve by training someone as a “memory expert” without duplication, understanding, power of choice of the received data, and knowing how to use it to achieve results in life? Our education is more geared toward “one way inflow of data to the students “ that one cannot easily challenge whether the text is correct or not, but all what one needs to know is how to relate the text to the examination questions. We can easily witness the failure of many graduates of good grade students in applying what they have learnt from school into life, and conclude that the talent of this generation is not so good as our earlier generation. But what has gone wrong?
In addition to our conventional school system, we have many other supporting businesses around the subject of so called “Education” that in fact they are "School Technologies', for example, how we prepare our kids for interviews for better school so to have a smooth school runway from kindergarden to university; where we should live to get a better school district; whom we need to connect so to help our kids studying smoothly in school; which tutoring schools we should send our kids to improve their memories to get good exam results; how we fill up our kid's time with activities that would help him to look good on his resume, etc, all kind of ramifications which are geared towards good examination grades without any inspection what exactly we need to have and do in educating our next generation with real results.
Our culture is held together by how well we can educate our own people including whether we can educate valuable subjects that are useful, and whether they are taught in a way that the individual and the society see the purposes and the need of them, so to have a roadmap how to achieve the purpose by our education.
So it is time to ask:
1) What are the purposes of our education?
2) When studying any subject, do we have any purpose of doing this subject? What kind of results do we expect in acquiring and applying the subject in life?
3) How does the subject we study relate to ourselves and others? Is it valuable?
4) How can we evaluate the information on the subject to know the importance, relevancy, application and have our own opinion on the subject?
5) Do we have any effective study method (rather than memorizing method) to help us to achieve the above and know how to learn anything in life as one wishes?
I have been educated in both school systems in Hong Kong and the United States. I see that there is a lack of effective education and study methods thoroughly taught in our school systems. Most of the time, we simply jump in receiving the teachings of the subject without first consulting the above questions for ourselves and from our teachers; with the assumption that we instinctively know how to study and if any improvement is needed in this system, it will be the effort on raising one’s abilities in receiving or memorizing the data of the subject.
We are self-determined beings. For any information we receive today, especially in this new era of information age, our self-determinism is very much required in the evaluation of the information so we can use valuable information to achieve the goals or purposes of the subject to the extent of our own goals and purposes in life; and from which we can possibly have a prospering culture of our own.
