Suo发表的《Education in China and in America》（zz）

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                  Education in China and in America        
                              
        Submitted by Zhigang Suo on Sun, 2007-04-01 21:33.   

• opinion
• college
  

    The New York Times Magazine this weekend featured a Harvard undergraduate student from China, and her work to shake up education in China.  The article is long, but if you grew up in China, it should be a quick read, and fun.  If you grew up in US or Europe, perhaps this is a helpful read, just to learn how other people live.
I  entered college in China in 1981.  Many things seemed to remain the same.  For many things are dominated by one thing:  the national entrance examination to get into college.  In my year, about 4% high school students went to college.  Now the number is 22%, as compared to 40% in the US.
The significant increase in the entrance rate doesn't seem to have alleviated the anxiety.  As a parent to a freshman college student, I can attest that junior and senior years in high school are not much fun even for students in the US.  Once a country has vastly increased the rate of college entrance, students will still want to get into "better" colleges.  The rat race is on if you are a rat, no matter where you are.
The NYT Magazine article also mentioned the Soviet-style over-specialized education in Chinese colleges.  My class in college had maybe 60 students specialized in compressors, another 60 students specialized in refrigeration, and yet another 60 students specialized in welding.  I was among the 60 specialized in mechanics.  I cannot recall the numbers exactly, but you get the picture.
It really wasn't as terrible as it sounds.  In order to specialize in mechanics, we had to study math, physics and chemistry.  We studied electrical circuits, alloy treatment, mechanical drawing, Fortran.  We even had a continuous stream of humanity courses:  history of communist party, political economics...  I'm not sure I enjoyed all the courses, but I cannot claim that these courses damaged my brain, either.  I remember some of the humanity courses required writing,   which turned out to be a useful skill.
As a consequence of specialization, we did learn a lot of mechanics.  By the end of college, we had courses on analytical mechanics, strength of materials, mechanics of structures, theory of elasticity, theory of plasticity, theory of vibration, fracture mechanics, fluid dynamics, finite elements, plates and shells, tensor calculus.
I often feel sorry for American students in my undergraduate class, knowing that strength of materials will be their first and last course in the mechanics of deformable materials.  So many beautiful sights unseen!  But they also seem to turn out to be OK.  A liberal (and superficial) eduction doesn't damage their brains, either.
All this high level debate about education makes me dizzy, and turns me off.  So far as I can tell, both systems of eduction work fine, and have their own limitations.  The bottom line is that the quantity of knowledge is too large to be crammed into 4 years, and you'd have to make choices, making it either narrow or shallow or perhaps both.  You'll just have to be prepared to engage yourself in life-long learning.
I suspect the Soviet-style specialization came about for a simple reason of economics: in old days in China, college graduates were so precious that the government would assign you a job after you graduated.  In hind sight, it never stopped amazing me how an 18-year old could be convinced to devote his life to the specialty of welding, or mechanics for that matter.
But my American students have kept telling me that they are presented with too many choices and they spend too much time worrying about if they have made the right choices.  Relax.  Nobody will really know if you make right or wrong choices.  So long as you remain curious enough to make choices, you'll be fine.  We are all in this game of learning for life, unless you are like Michael Suo and dream about the ultimate method of learning.



来自 http://imechanica.org/node/1179

zccbest

力学专业学化学干什么啊，中国的大学活脱脱就是一个个技校啊
看了**公开课程才发现原来数学并不是这么枯燥啊

hpf

支持锁:)

t1314j2003

We are all in this game of learning for life,

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