The biggest gap in Education between China and the United States is at the primary and secondary school level, and it is also the root cause of the decline of mainland college students
Today, not to mention ordinary college students, even the number of graduate students has exceeded 3 million. The number of people taking the National Unified Graduate Admissions Examination at the end of 2021 even reached a suffocating 4.57 million.
Such a status quo also makes people's views on "college students" become "strange", and even many signs show that the life of today's college students has nothing to do with learning, every day is either all night Internet or various entertainment activities, life day and night are reversed, diet relies on takeaway, take the money given by parents to live happily...
So why such a stereotype? Are today's college students really "sinking" because they enter the university?
Let's take a look at the views of Gao Gang, a professor at Chinese Min University.
Professor Gao Gang graduated from Peking University and is currently the executive vice dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at Chinese Min University.
Whether it is his own overseas education experience or the experience of sending his children overseas for education, he has given Professor Gao Gang a wealth of comparative materials.
As a university professor, Mr. Gao Gang once made in-depth observations and thoughts when his children were in elementary school in the United States, and said in an interview: The differences in the education of Chinese and American students are mainly reflected in the primary and secondary school stage, at this stage, Chinese parents and schools pay too much attention to students' scores and grades.
For Professor Gao Gang, who is familiar with Chinese university students and American university students, he believes that Chinese college students are undoubtedly more prominent in terms of diligence, execution and persistence; but American students are relatively stronger in their creativity, receptivity and ability to think independently.
Professor Gao Gang believes that the reason for this situation should be that mainland education should pay more attention to primary education. There are many students in the mainland, and people's competition has begun almost since the kindergarten period.
In the primary school period, it is even worse: countless parents hold the mentality of "hoping to become a dragon" and "winning at the starting line", and at the age when the child has not yet had the ability to think independently, they begin to choose various tuition institutions and extracurricular interest classes for them, trying to make their children surpass their peers at an early age.
So under such "high pressure", many students will gradually lose the ability to think independently, and the purpose of learning will gradually become to obtain good results, get affirmation and praise from the outside world, and get correct answers, which will continue until the college entrance examination.
However, after twelve years of cold windows and killing "thousands of troops" to enter the university, students will find that there will no longer be people on the university campus to "push" themselves to learn, and all the motivation comes from themselves.
If there is no motivation to learn independently, then life is completely free. A college student can skip studying, not reading, or even attending classes, and the consequences of these behaviors are far less obvious than not studying in college.
The word "learning" is probably the word that a person hears the most in the first twenty or even thirty years of life. Regarding the process of "learning," Aristotle argued, "I love my teacher, but I love the truth more."
In the field of social sciences, Sir Edward Taylor believes that culture in human society is "learnable", and learning is the process of mastering various customs, habits, laws, morals and other things in society... For parents and students, the term has different meanings.
For the students themselves, learning is always interest-based. As we all know, mainland students will face the choice of liberal arts and liberal arts or today's subjects in high school, in order to determine the focus of their learning and the direction in which they should strive, which is actually a disguised embodiment of interest.
Many students, whether in primary or secondary school, will show inattention and partiality in some classrooms, which is rooted in a lack of sufficient interest.
People sometimes think that interest is innate, for example, some children are not naturally good at arithmetic, then this child can not learn science courses.
In fact, it is not entirely so, interests are multifaceted, even if it is a pure science such as physics, it will still contain the humanistic care of Leibniz, Spinoza and others; even a very humanistic concept such as "yin and yang" is also considered to be the originator of "binary algorithm".
Therefore, for students, whether they are interested in a science or not is actually not absolute. Before you deeply understand the connotation of a discipline, perhaps your interests are still buried deep in your heart.
For students, understanding is a prerequisite for interest.
So for parents, in fact, guidance and tolerance are very important. In the eyes of many parents, whether a child "can learn", the standard is whether he can score high, whether he can complete the homework assigned by the school, and whether his usual classroom performance is safe. In fact, these are just one aspect of showing their learning ability.
For parents, they are the child's first teacher, and interest in many things sometimes comes from parents.
For parents, when the child asks you some questions, learn to have a guiding, follow-up answer, rather than indifferently telling the child a noun or a number.
For parents whose children have entered colleges and universities, a large part of the responsibility that should be fulfilled at this time is concentrated on "reading for their children", which is very hard and even makes many parents exhausted.
But in fact, at this time, if you pay more attention to your child's learning tasks, your child will be much easier when faced with career choices later.
Many parents think that their children "have already gone to college, and it doesn't matter whether they learn or not", but in fact, this view is incorrect: studying in college is to let them find a job, the key to integration into society, and the magic weapon for a better life, not just to pass a few exams and become a student union cadre, which is only the most superficial thing in university life.
All in all, in China, excessive pressure on primary and secondary schools has led students to fall into a state of passive learning. For both students and parents, when a child enters college, a process of transition from passive learning to active learning is necessary. Otherwise four years of college would be just a muddy time.
