Posted by mshelley on February 07, 19103 at 22:12:15:
Dear Sir,
I'm a Chinese university student. This is my first practice essay for GRE writing . I'm sorry for posting this essay here. As I'm not very good at English writing, and there's now few GRE writing evaluating website, would you please revise and evaluate it for me, when you have time? That would be very nice of you. Thank you!
Issue104"It is primarily through formal education that a culture tries to perpetuate the ideas it favors and discredit the ideas it fears."
Every culture has its mainstream values, which play an important role in people's life. A culture usually tries to keep its society going in its favorite track through a primary means of formal education. But such a function of education should not be excessively emphasized; otherwise the essence of education would be distorted.
It is true that formal education acts as a crucial means for preserving what a culture perceives as essential. For example, China perpetuates its valuable classic and contemporary literature and arts by arranging students' courses, including their extracurricular activities. Students today are also taught modern sciences introduced from other countries, which are believed to be vital for the development of China. However, when formal education is used as a method to discredit the ideas a culture fears, it will go astray and so will the culture.
To get a better appreciation of this problem, we had better turn first to the characteristics of formal education. First, in contrast to family education, similar ideas can be produced in bulk by formal education, while mass media could only play an introductory role with respect to this task.
In this way, ideas are just like products in the assembly line. Every products would be controlled under a certain standard. Any aberrant one would be thrown away as a reject. Second, adolescents, whose characters and values are still easier to shape, are the future of the society and will play the crucial part. Their ideas are formed during their formal education, which plays a decisive role in the rest of their lives, and will ultimately influence the future society vehemently. Therefore, through formal education a culture can keep its society going in the direction it desires.
It's proved by history that if a culture narrowly quashes ideas it fears, lest these ideas preponderate over current mainstream ones, no doubt it will only circumscribe students' thinking. In this case, no different, new idea will come out, creativity will be frustrated, and existing fallacy will be concealed. Moreover, when formal education acts as a political tool, it will probably bring the whole nation disaster. Taking economics theory for example, Chinese only accepted Marxism economics before reformation in the late 1970s, while regarded other economics as rubbish. Single planned economy which was carried out in that time did work at first, but caused a big waste of resources later, and seriously hampered the development of the whole country's economy finally, even left behind many problems to recent developments of China. Nowadays we change our minds and consider Marxism economics as only one academic embranchment of economics. With no-limits mind, we introduce all kinds of proper knowledge all around the world, which refresh our minds and push our society forward.
A healthy culture should not fear different ideas, should not fear its descendants, but should have a broad perspective. Formal education, which takes the mission of culture spreading, should give students a pair of bright eyes and a wise mind, to think, to discover, to create, rather than indoctrinate them with certain ideas. With critical thinking, students are able to discern what kind of ideas will do good to their individual developments, what kind of thoughts will be conducive to the welfare of the whole nation. That's where the essence of formal education is. (550 words)