Author: Deshui Yao

Education began when we were very young, and we have been instilled with the idea that we must receive education since we were young. I have always agreed with this point of view. Until one day, I experienced something that changed my mind and made me wonder whether it is worthwhile to receive an education. what exactly will education bring us? Does what we learned really apply to life?

 

This is something that happened in China, and it is very common. College students start to worry about their jobs after graduation. The majors they studied during college are not practical, and because they do not have any work experience, it is difficult for them to find a good and decent job. There are countless examples in the news, and we often see them in real life, My father’s schoolmate has extremely good grade while in college, but after he graduated, he couldn’t find suitable job, In desperation, he find a job that has nothing to do with his profession and has a very low salary.

 

So, from kindergarten to university graduation, we spend one third of the day at school, one third for sleeping, and the remaining one third is our free time, and these times we have To spend a part of it for learning, in the end, we may only have two or three hours left when we can really use what we like. We spent so much money in 20 years, spent so much time, and ended up with a meager salary. Does it worthwhile for us to invest so much time in learning?

 

Some people may say that I am too extreme, and there are successful examples, right? But have you ever wondered how many successful people account for the seven billion people in the world?

 

Of course, it does not mean that receiving education is not good. The benefits of receiving education are also many. Let us understand the truth, understand the etiquette, and learn how to communicate with people… The financial, legal and other systems are also supported by education.

 

But there are some courses, it should be said that there are many courses. We don’t actually need them, such as mathematics, biology, chemistry and so on. We won’t use them at all unless we have a professional need after graduating from university.

An experience that changed my views on education was my month on U.S.A, the way how teacher tread us, the way how they teach, everything was extremely different from my view of school.

The educational concept from China and USA are different, We only cares about the grade that shows on the test, the score means all. Teacher only wants grade, parents only wants grade, because of that brainwashing education, I used to study like a machine, only put things in my brain, take out when exam coming, I don’t even know what’s the purpose of those thing in my mind, but just for getting a good grade。

At U.S.A, once I was in classroom, the teacher called me for a question, I give her the exactly the same thing from the textbook. But she asked: I know that’s the answer, but this is from the textbook, I want your answer, use your own words to say it. At that time, my English wasn’t really good, I can only get a few words from what she said, so I thought she didn’t hear clearly, so I repeated my answer . She probably figured that I couldn’t understand her, so she asked the other Chinese student to translate for me, after that she asked me again, but  I couldn’t really give one since never try to integrate the knowledge in to my own things , so I said I don’t know, she didn’t embarrass me, but asked me to have my own answer next time. So I start to make knowledge in to my own things, try to understand it, and use my own way to say, describe it ,use in the real world…

When I was in China, English was always my worst course, and it is the same now. It used to be because I was not interested in it, but now it is difficult to overcome the grammatical conversion between Chinese and English.
When I first came, I really didn’t know anything about English. The only thing I can remember is the 26 English letters and a few of the most commonly used words, such as he she me. When I first came, I lived in Flushing , there are more Chinese people, so didn’t feel any hard with communication. but when summer ends , once I stepped into the school , I felt as if I had come to Mars and could not understand anything teacher nor students said . But fortunately, there are Chinese students in the school, and it happened that one of my classmates lives next door to me. I would often go to his home after school and study with him. He helped me a lot. At the beginning, we would recite words together, and then after the vocabulary got up, we practiced spoken English, watched the news, learned other people’s words to practice pronunciation, and gradually improved our English level.