Bock's "University Goals"

Ma Jianhong (Juris Doctor)

The job of university teachers is relatively simple, in addition to engaging in scientific research in related subject areas, the other is to complete certain teaching tasks. Different from secondary school teachers, in terms of teaching, due to the lack of assessment pressure such as the promotion rate, the classroom teacher only needs to fill the class time, finish the course, organize the students to finish the exam at the end of the semester, and log in the good results, so the relationship between the university teacher and the student cannot be too close. This statement sounds as if college education is simply a teacher simply instilling knowledge in students, and students completing credits and then graduating. In fact, for everyone's academic enlightenment and character development, four years of college is a critical period, because university education has its own goals. On this point, Drake Bock has a unique insight in his "The Way Back to College".

Drake Bock is a well-known American expert in higher education research, he began to serve as dean of Harvard Law School from 1968, served as president of Harvard University from 1971 to 1991, and taught at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the School of Education until 2005. In his book The Return to the University, he talks about the goals of undergraduate education. Mr. Bock believes that university education should allow students to develop some extremely important qualities during the critical period of growth, so the university's training goals should be multifaceted, and these goals should be widely accepted and carefully defined. After a rigorous selection, he proposed several particularly important projects as goals for university education.

He believes that all undergraduate students need to improve their expression skills in various forms, the most widely known of which is precise and beautiful written expression, followed by clear and persuasive oral expression. Although students learn to write from an early age, they will also take the composition test when taking the college entrance examination, but due to the influence of test-taking education, the written expression ability of students is general, and the writing, language, logical structure and other aspects need to be improved, and due to the lack of discussion classes and debate classes, students' oral expression ability cannot be properly trained, and the ability to participate in work after graduation is generally lacking.

In addition to improving expressive skills, Professor Bock believes that another fundamental goal of university education is to cultivate and improve students' clear thinking and critical thinking skills. He also listed some common ways of thinking and habits, such as clearly understanding and defining the problem; distinguishing different arguments and interests in the same problem; collecting relevant materials and analyzing the interrelationship between different materials; proposing as many feasible solutions as possible around a problem; analyzing evidence and using common reasoning methods such as inference and analogy to examine various solutions, and finally proposing reasonable judgments and best solutions, etc. By mastering these ways of thinking and habits, students can solve many problems in daily life and benefit students for life.

Living in today's era of information fragmentation, we often see that whenever an incident occurs, it will always trigger online public opinion and even online violence. People often glance at the title and start to express their opinions eagerly, and there are many people who play such keyboard warriors as college students or once-highly educated social people. In fact, as long as we think more about problems and rationally use "critical thinking", we can avoid blind obedience and credulity.

Regarding the cultivation of college students' moral reasoning ability, Professor Bork does not believe that moral training is only the responsibility of parents and primary and secondary school teachers, because moral issues actually include three kinds of abilities, namely, the ability to think rigorously about how to deal with moral dilemmas, the ability to evaluate the rationality of various points of view, and the ability to judge correct behavior, and it is the unshirkable task of the university to help young people recognize the existence of moral problems and think about these problems rigorously. When it comes to legal education specifically, students do face the moral dilemma of how to choose, such as "law schools have been teaching students how to reason about legal issues, but also know that students sometimes deliberately withhold real information from important clients in order to please them."

In addition to teaching students deep professional knowledge, universities should also "equip students with certain abilities, knowledge and a wide range of interests so that they can enjoy a rich and varied life." "These interests can be both academic and artistic, such as understanding and appreciating music, poetry, oil painting, or playing, poetry, painting, or sports, such as tennis, swimming, running, etc." Cultivating students with a wide range of interests can broaden their horizons and avoid the danger of over-specialization. In addition, it also helps students to think about the eternal problems of good and evil, justice and partiality, war and equality, so that people's lives are no longer boring. Of course, it is not easy for universities to cultivate students' broad interests, whether in terms of time, energy or teaching methods, they will be limited to a certain extent, but what universities can do is to "strive to awaken students' interest in learning, so that they can live in different fields and learn from the old."

In daily life, we often hear a saying that "the things we learn in college are basically not used in society." In fact, the goal of university education is not to teach students a specific knowledge of solving specific problems in society, but to let them learn a skill and ability, which is probably what we usually call "teaching people to fish", once students master this ability, it will help them to provide them with ideas and methods to solve various problems, and make them benefit for life. Comics/Chen Bin