laitimes

Dialogue with the Dean of Xinya College at Tsinghua University: These two points are very important if you want to cultivate children's ability to adapt to the future

The full text has a total of 3900 words and a reading time of 10 minutes

Guest Introduction:

Mei Ciqi is the dean of Xinya College at Tsinghua University. In 1995, he was admitted to Tsinghua University, and after graduating with a master's degree from Tsinghua in 02, he went to the United States to study for a Ph.D., and returned to China to teach at Tsinghua School of Public Administration in '09. I have been doing general education related work since 19 years.

Established in 2014, Xinya College is the first college in Tsinghua University that does not discriminate between majors, with a special emphasis on general education.

How general education is implemented at the elementary, junior high and high school levels

Hao Jingfang:

Do you think that general education should run through the entire basic education stage of elementary and junior high school?

Mei Zhiqi:

Yes. There are two things that Tsinghua Primary School does that I highly recommend parents to do.

The first thing is to read the classics, and you have to read them to the end. This is an educational philosophy of Tsinghua Primary School.

Buying books is not a way to accompany your child, the important thing is to read it with your child. Parents should let their children read the whole book, so that the child can spend enough effort and time in one book, not just read it in pieces.

It would be great if children could read a book in its entirety. For example, ancient traditional Chinese novels or fables such as Aesop's fables, especially reading foreign ones, are more difficult and require a little psychological hurdle to overcome. And I think that these fables like those of various countries are created by the group of society to provide norms for society, and there are very deep logical ideas of social life and philosophy.

The second is Problem Based Learning (PBL). Tsinghua Primary School often takes children to do projects. If you pick a project that the child can jump up and reach, if the child can finish the project with other children, this is especially helpful for the child.

Knowing the eyes does not mean knowing the hands, you tell him 10 times it is better to let him do it again. Even if it is done poorly, it is rewarding when it is done.

This is an inspiration given to me by teacher Ji Linhong from the Department of Mechanics.

Mr. Ji Linhong has been doing a mechanical design competition in Tsinghua since 1998, and he told me that he has an experience: two types of people have gained the most in the competition, and one is those who are the most successful and have won the grand prize; The other category is classmates who have encountered huge failures.

It is because he has spent a lot of effort, even if he fails to do it, he can learn a lesson, and he can make better things after he walks out of society in the future.

The GTP era has arrived, and now everyone is talking about what technology people need most after GTP, and you have to ask questions. Parents are the same, you need to set a question that your child can get by jumping and let them try to solve the problem. In my opinion, problem-solving is probably the most important one.

What is education? Education is all about creating the environment. Parents can create such an environment by letting their children read and do it. In fact, after you create the conditions for him, you motivate him, and then let him do it himself, never overstepping the line. A good teacher can sometimes be like a motivator.

Education from a reading and hands-on perspective is general education. Liberal education itself can't be rushed, right? There is nothing that directly works. Be patient. Because learning itself is to be learned by himself, this is called learning, right? Otherwise, no matter how good you teach, it is useless.

Hao Jingfang:

Just now, Teacher Mei actually mentioned two points, one is reading, and the other is hands-on work.

Our children's college does project-based learning PBL, such as 5~7-year-old children have projects to improve the inconvenience of urban blocks, there are solutions to survival problems on Mars, finding the cause of pterosaur extinction, etc., similar small science projects and art creation projects.

When doing these projects, you will find that children may not have such high knowledge and technical ability, but their ideas are there. After such learning, after they are 10 years old and have the ability, the child's creativity suddenly bursts out. Because his thinking is cultivated first, and after his skills keep up, creativity is continuous.

Dialogue with the Dean of Xinya College at Tsinghua University: These two points are very important if you want to cultivate children's ability to adapt to the future

How to adjust at the moment of the grade involution

What is the relationship between test taking and general education?

Hao Jingfang:

I actually want to ask President Mei, what do you think of the phenomenon that academic performance is getting more and more volatile now, and when you get to university, it is still based on exams, and how to reconcile the relationship between exam taking and general education?

Mei Zhiqi:

First of all, I find this problem difficult to solve.

Many parents think that their children can only have a good life if they are admitted to a good university. Children need to receive a good university education, but parents must have a peaceful mind.

Parents always have a feeling that time does not wait, and they feel that to cultivate their children earlier and cultivate their AI, they must put this mentality down. Many good experts don't actually start learning something very early.

The child you cultivate will go to society in the future, and whether he can go to Tsinghua actually does not determine his happiness in life, right? Whether he has a sound personality, whether he thinks calmly about things, in the end he will grow up very different.

How to reconcile the relationship between test taking and general education, I myself feel that children's reading habits are particularly important, and reading is the biggest health preservation. The rules by which our society operates are organized by language, and language itself requires great richness, and richness is actually obtained from these words accumulated by human beings in the past.

Parents should also make a good example, you yourself must become a person who loves reading, so that children have the opportunity to love reading.

Hao Jingfang:

Yes, words are indeed the essence of human wisdom.

What should many parents do if their children do not like to read? I think this requires companionship and patience.

The first is to increase children's interest in reading through parent-child reading. You yourself first feel the beauty of the book world, and then take him in, and he will be more likely to like it.

Second, when children have just read independently or read more serious books, they do not like to read because they do not have enough cognitive ability and do not understand well. You can allow him to read simple picture books, comic books, etc., and when his cognitive ability improves, he can read it. It turns out that things that he feels very stressful can be enjoyed later.

In education, the more urgent we are to let children achieve something at a very young age, you will turn a beautiful thing into a stressful thing, and we must have a long-term educational mentality.

Dialogue with the Dean of Xinya College at Tsinghua University: These two points are very important if you want to cultivate children's ability to adapt to the future

What abilities should the child have

To fit in for the future?

Hao Jingfang:

In fact, I really want to ask Dean Mei, that is, children always step into the real world after graduating from college, what kind of necessary survival ability do we hope he has, and whether he can be better cultivated by general education.

Mei Zhiqi:

To summarize it like this:

First, on a personal level, it is necessary to have the ability to bounce back in adversity, which some people call inverse quotient.

Second, always be prepared to explore and learn under conditions of incomplete knowledge.

Third, from the group level, it is necessary to enjoy the group.

Fourth, the important prerequisite for these abilities is empathy.

Let me expand on the first three levels.

First, on an individual level, we must be resilient. When encountering failure, can you have the ability to rebound? You have to try it in college life to become able to develop such an ability.

Second, do you dare to learn something new? In fact, when you look back now, what you learned in college will be useless in the workplace, completely different. But the most important ability is that you get out of the familiar realm of knowledge and have a very good ability to relearn, right? You need to be able to read books, to be able to ask more people who have a certain knowledge than you do, which is the ability to conduct independent research and learning when the knowledge is not complete.

Third, how do you go to the group. The term "emotional intelligence" is a bit rotten these days, and I think it's more important that you know how to work with people.

Cooperation is very important and difficult. It's not just about 1+1>2, but if you don't cooperate, your ability to resist risk is very poor. Don't overestimate yourself, you will find that this thing is done in the end is the strength of the team. So it's very important to make friends at the college level that you can make for life, because it's really not easy to go into society.

When I studied at Tsinghua, I sometimes thought that undergraduate knowledge did not come in handy, and it gave me an important point that there was a group of people who could work with.

So I say these three abilities are very important. This is actually equivalent to a person who has both the ability to complete something independently and the ability to complete a thing with others.

Dialogue with the Dean of Xinya College at Tsinghua University: These two points are very important if you want to cultivate children's ability to adapt to the future

How can you develop the capacity to adapt to these futures?

Hao Jingfang:

The two abilities that Principal Mei talked about just now are rarely exercised in examination-oriented education.

Standard answers will be provided in the test taking system, just do so. If there are open-ended questions, you don't have the knowledge and you don't have standard practices, you can't explore independently. The ability to work with others is even less exercised.

I once took students from Tsinghua High School and Tsinghua International School to discuss topics of interest in the group, and everyone sat there, and no one opened their mouth to lead the discussion. I also found it necessary to do project-based learning at a young age. After three or four projects, the child has learned to discuss, divide labor, work in groups, and finally learn to do things together.

Mei Zhiqi:

Just talked about letting children have the ability to get along with others, we are not cultivating social cattle, nor are we training test takers in leaderless groups, whether a person can get along well with the group, in the final analysis, whether he really likes other people, this is very important.

I hope that it is very important for us to cultivate children's deep love for this society and people, not just focus on KPIs, traffic, and these external evaluation standards.

Hao Jingfang:

It's particularly moving.

In the process of growing up, the child is guided to pay attention to scores, skills, etc. for a long time, and the part of his heart that longs to be loved is not seen, and he has a surge of love to love others.

Sometimes parents take their children too much to focus on correctness. Whether I clocked in or not, where did I go to find learning materials, we were all too concerned about these digital things.

What is our ultimate goal? We want to raise the next generation to be real living people, not dummys. You train him to be a dummy, and then let him compete with robots, and as a dummy he naturally can't compete with robots. This abundant and full vitality of human nature is irreplaceable.

Not everything depends on the right and victory to motivate, love and beauty are the most important driving force.

The best gift a parent can give a child is that you really enjoy being with him and that you offer an outpouring of love to your child. This kind of love between relatives is itself the child's feeling of the world's first human relationship. Such children will also be more likely to like other people when they grow up.

In addition, we can also take our children to feel the beauty of those places in life, and we must be able to be full of love for life and the world, so that we can look at children's education more peacefully. This feeling of beauty is the motivation for him to do many things later, and this love itself is the source of internal driving force for many things.

Dialogue with the Dean of Xinya College at Tsinghua University: These two points are very important if you want to cultivate children's ability to adapt to the future

Read on