4. Discover your own interest
The right kind of education should also help the student to discover what he is most interested in. if he does not find his true vocation, all his life will seem wasted; he will feel frustrated doing something which he does not want to do.
If he wants to be an artist and instead becomes a clerk in some office, he will spend his life grumbling and pining away. So it is important for each one to find out what he wants to do, and then to see if it is worth doing. A boy may want to be a soldier; but before he takes up soldiering, he should be helped to discover whether the military vocation is beneficial to the whole of mankind.
Right education should help the student, not only to develop his capacities, but to understand his own highest interest. In a world torn by wars, destruction and misery, one must be able to build a new social order and bring about a different way of living.
The responsibility for building a peaceful and enlightened society rests chiefly with the educator, and it is obvious, without becoming emotionally stirred up about it, that he has a very great opportunity to help in achieving that social transformation. The right kind of education does not depend on the regulations of any government or the methods of any particular system; it lies in out won hand, in the hands of the parents and the teachers.
If parents really cared for their children, they would build a new society; but fundamentally most parents do not care, and so they have no time for this most urgent problem. They have time for making money, for amusements, for rituals and worship, but no time to consider what is the right kind of education for their children. This is a fact that the majority of people do not want to face. To face it might mean that they would have to give up their amusements and distractions, and certainly they are not willing to do that. So they send their children off to schools ad here the teacher’s cares no more for them than they do. Why should he care? Teaching is merely a job to him, a way of earning money.
The world we have created is so superficial, so artificial, so ugly if one looks behind the curtain; and we decorate the curtain, hoping that everything will somehow come right. Most people are unfortunately not very earnest about life, except, perhaps, when it comes to making money, gaining power, or pursuing sexual excitement. They do not want to face the other complexities of life, and that is why, when their children grow up, they are immature and unintegrated as their parents, constantly battling with themselves and with the world.
We say so easily that we love our children; but is there love in our hearts when we accept the existing social conditions, when we do not want to bring about a fundamental transformation in this destructive society? And so long as we look to the specialists to educate our children, this confusion and misery will continue; for the specialists, being concerned with the part and not the whole, are themselves unintegrated.
Instead of being the most honored and responsible occupation, education is now considered slightingly, and most educators are fixed in a routine. They are not really concerned with integration and intelligence, but with the imparting of information; and a man who merely imparts information with the world crashing about him is not an educator.
An educator is not merely a giver of information; is one who points the way to wisdom, to truth. Truth is far more important than the teacher….To create a new society each one of us has to be a true teacher, which means that we have to be both the pupil and the master; we have to educate ourselves. |
发表于 2010-4-8 18:16
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发表于 2010-12-18 11:35
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