Education today really isn’t that much different from what it was a hundred years ago. It’s still classrooms full of students all learning the same thing at the same pace from teachers who spend thirty years teaching more or less the same thing.
However, the world that the next generation will grow up in will be different from anything we have seen. It will be a world filled with artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, automation, virtual reality, personalized medicine, self-driving cars, and people on Mars; a world where people might not even have jobs and where society itself may be arranged in fundamentally different ways. How are we supposed to know how to prepare them to succeed in a world that we cannot predict?
It starts by rethinking what a school is. The role of school should no longer be to fill heads with information, rather it should be a place that inspires students to be curious about the world they live in. Don’t hold back that curiosity by making them spend their childhoods preparing for one test after another.
The ability to adapt and learn something new should be valued above all else. Gone are the days when you pick a profession and just do that one thing for the rest of your life. People will need to know how to learn something new multiple times over in their lives because our knowledge of the world and who we are is progressing incredibly quickly. If the last time you learned anything new was when you were in school then you will be missing out on the new ways of understanding the world.
In addition, education should give people an understanding that the world is not divided up into different subjects. All fields of knowledge bleed into each other and none can be fully understood in isolation (孤立).
Much of this may seem idealistic or unrealistic, but change is needed if we are going to figure out how to live in the future.
【小题1】What’s the purpose of the first paragraph?| A．To present the complexity of education. |
| B．To stress the importance of education. |
| C．To describe what education used to be like. |
| D．To suggest education is far behind the times. |
| A．To inspire students’ curiosity. |
| B．To guarantee happy childhood. |
| C．To provide sufficient information. |
| D．To prepare students for a lifelong profession. |
| A．One should learn as much as he can at school. |
| B．Schools should teach new ways to change the world. |
| C．Students’ ability to adapt should be the priority of education. |
| D．School subjects reflect how the world is divided into different fields. |
| A．Standards Tests Remove Students’ Curiosity |
| B．Gone Are the Days of Traditional School Education |
| C．It’s Time to Change How We Educate Our Children |
| D．Change in Education Is Too Idealistic and Unrealistic |
