speech on Education 关于教育的英文演讲

Speech

1 Good morning, everyone! This week, we are going to learn a new topic——the Aims of Education. Differ from Whitehead’s idea; I think the aim of education is to help people form a lifelong learning consciousness. In my eyes, education is not an end, but a means to an end. In other words, we do not educate children only for teaching them knowledge but to help them form a lifelong learning consciousness.

2 We can see that, as education appeared, the aim of it has always been a hot topic to human beings, especially the great thinkers. Their ideas towards the aim of education reflect the educational changes in human society. That is to say the aim of education is not static. In ancient Greek, Aristotle thought that “Education must aim at the development of the full potentialities of each man”. Later, it developed into the idea of training young people to be well-educated gentlemen or citizens in Henry Newman’s work The Idea of a University.

3 As the society develops, the aim of education has taken in new meanings and implications-----to educate and train people to be all-roundly cultivated persons. To achieve this goal, one has to spend his whole life to learn. However, in the usual case people just spend some years on study in schools or universities. After they leave school, they seldom pick up books. Now the government is advocating building a “learning society”. It provides people chances to do some continuous learning in other schools besides the formal ones, like night schools.

4 In fact, the idea that education should be throughout a person’s life has been existing for a long time. In China, it can be traced further back to “the Analects of Confucius”. Confucius said, “If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come be without great faults”. This indicates his idea of lifelong learning. Besides, some famous western philosophers also held the idea that individual education should be a continuous process. For example, the great thinker Aristotle claimed that “Education is the best provision for the journey to old age”. These claims above show that those great educators take education as a long term task.

5 Unfortunately, the time that people spend in schools or universities is limited, so is the knowledge they can learn in the formal schooling. As a result, it is significant for teacher to promote learner autonomy and guide students to form a lifelong learning consciousness in school. But usually people do not take it serious until they leave school. I would like to take my elder cousin as an example.

6 My elder cousin went to a professional school after he graduated from high school. One year later, he became a workman in a factory. He was satisfied with the job and stopped learning. Yet as time goes by, now he feels that the task is beginning to exceed his ability. This is not a single case happen to those “graduates”.

7 Nowadays, more and more people realize this problem and start to take some measures to solve it. In order to get a higher degree, people take some courses on the Internet or go to night schools to do their further study. Such being

the case, why not help people build up their consciousness of lifelong learning when they are still in school? Thus they can do some preparation and try their best to create opportunities for further study even after they leave school.

8 To conclude, the aim of education ought to educate people to consider education as a continuous process and form this consciousness in school so that people can receive any kind of education in any time or anywhere to adapt to the development of society.