Todays Education System

Todays Education System An Essay on the Present Education System We live differently in the 21st century. This century is highly connected with technology advancement, high mobility, globalization, and generation Z. Generation Z or iGeneration is a name used for the cohort of people born from the early 2000s to the present day. This generation has some different characteristics with its preceding generation, allowing us to implement different approach in education. Our Education System: Today I will start with the problem of our current education system. The biggest problem is, it did not motivate kids. Millions of kids do not know any purposing of going to school, except obligation. When we went to school we were indoctrinated by scenario: work hard, rewarded did well, get a college, and finally you will have a job. But in the future, it is not guarantee anymore, not if the route to it marginalises what you think important about yourself. Moreover, facing the unpredictable economic circumstances. This current system was designed and conceived for a different age: Victorians, between 18th and 19th century. It was arranged in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. The intellectual model of the mind stated that the real intelligence consist of capacity of deductive reasoning and knowledge of the classics, what we come to think as academic ability. It divides people to academic and non academic, smart people and non-smart people. In consequences, many brilliant people think that they are not. In this system, these kids are medicated. They are forced to forget any distraction such as games, iphones, television, and focus to the boring stuff at school. Students start losing their interest, hardly thinking straight, and losing their attention completely. In class, they are given the theory and required to memorize it, without knowing the relevant of that context in real world. That is why students still disengaged. It becomes more severe with quantitative standardised testing. They only know they oblige to study and pass the standard. Education is modeled based on the interest of industrialization and in the image of it. Schools are organised on factory lines and students are its manufactured products. The Victorians produce education which remake us photocopy of each other. How do you be submissive, how do you sit patiently be disengaged for about two hours and take it. The arts are the victims of this mentality. The arts, especially address the idea of aesthetic experience, when senses are operating at their peak. When we arresting about the excitement of these things with our experiencing, when we are fully alive. While anaesthetic is experience which shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what is happening. We are getting our children educated by anaesthetising them. The implications are easy to be described. These kids only give answers based on what their teacher said. They are afraid to see things from different perspectives, lose their critical skill, and very bad predicting what will make them happy. The New Model of School Designing new model of education needs collaboration of students, teachers, schools, and government. Lets start with basic question, what kind of output that we really want from education system? I always imagine if schools can be place where students can come excitingly, full of self-directed knowledge, so much more passion and information about they want to do. It is the real learning process, they learn something when they have reason to learn it. First, we should waking them up to what is inside of themselves! If we are interested in the model of learning, we should not start from production line mentality. We have to change our direction from conformity-standardised testing and curriculum to divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is an essential capacity for creativity-the process of having original ideas that have value. It is ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of ways to interpret a question, and to think laterally, not just in linear or convergent ways. We might not judge this subject is superior and this is not. We teach them how to believe their self interest, appreciate it, and facilitate that. It also crucial to change the culture of our institutions that treat academic students as the potentials product and non-academic students as the residuals. Second, we have to cut the disengaged chain between school and the reality. We must revised our goal: score oriented become exploration oriented. Students are not teached how to answer questions on the exam, but how one problem in the real word can be connected and answered by theory they learned in the class. They must not forced to forget their favourite games or television channels, but we lead combine them with education. The point is, we do not limit their imagination. They may come with unique questions or even unanswerable, but it is the way they can start thinking critically.Students will understand how their school linked to their life, and they used to see things from science perspective. Third, focusing on the reading comprehension and critical skill. Actually, it based on Indonesia condition. Trends in International Mathematics and Science (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessment revealed that the reading ability of Indonesian children is low. Whereas, reading ability is the fundamental of science learning. Why it can happen? One of the reason is, we do not have reading comprehension curriculum, we only have language curriculum. I also have just learned that reading to understanding is by making annotation beside the important paragraph and rewrite it on our own words through essay, not the multiple choice. The multiple choice-we used to use, is not stimulate students to love literacy and read, causing the open-minded is not formed. Finally, they do not know how to solve a problem-things they will face in reality. As I said before, this education reform also need teacher collaboration. We know, sometimes teacher treats their students as how they were treated by their teacher. It is totally different. Today generation is immune from such rigid school and strict rules are not effective anymore. Teachers have to know how to make them go to school voluntarily and fully motivated. The classroom has to be designed to provide enough space for improving students imagination and exploration. However, teachers are the executor of curriculum in the class. Go through country with the best education system, Finland, teachers there are well educated and trained. Better education system need better human resource to deliver it. Finally, what I hope to be in the new model of school and high school for 21st century are the students that full of learning enthusiasm and the teachers that focuses on exploration rather than how to prepare students passing the exam. I want reading-writing culture and curiosity colored the school. I do not want modern institution dumped critical thinking just because there is not any argument facilitator. Education is not knowledge transfer that remake students as a blueprint of their teacher. Students must have ability to transform the knowledge, so the final goal of education to put out generations who can answer the era threat can be achieved. As the Malcolm Forbes quotes Educations purpose to replace an empty mind with an open one

Chinese Foreign Policy Essay

Specific portfolio. (See â€Å"Collective Leadership.†) To ensure Party control, the top-ranked members of the PSC serve concurrently as the heads of other parts of the political system. The top ranked PSC member, Party General Secretary Hu Jintao, for example, serves concurrently as head of the military, in his capacity as head of Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and as the head of State, in his capacity as State President. The second-ranked PSC member, Wu Bangguo, serves as Chairman of the National People’s Congress (NPC), while the third-ranked PSC member, Wen Jiabao, serves as Premier of the State Council, and the fourth-ranked member, Jia Qinglin, heads the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and oversees the Party’s relations with non-Communist groups. Portfolios for other PSC members include the propaganda system; management of the Party bureaucracy and Hong Kong and Macau; finance and economics; Party discipline; and the internal security system. 32 PSC members also head Party â€Å"Leading Small Groups† (LSGs) for their policy areas. LSGs are secretive bodies intended to facilitate cross-agency coordination in implementation of Politburo Standing Committee decisions. The National Security Leading Small Group and the Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group, for example, are both headed by Party General Secretary Hu Jintao. The next highest decision-making body is the full Politburo, which, with the suspension of the disgraced former Chongqing Party Secretary, Bo Xilai, now comprises 24 officials. In addition to the nine members of the PSC, Politburo members include the heads of major departments of the Party bureaucracy, the two highest ranking officers in the Chinese military, State Council Vice Premiers, a State Councilor, and Party leaders from important cities and provinces. The current Politburo has only one female member. Because of its relatively unwieldy size and the geographic diversity of its members, the full Politburo is not involved in day-to-day decision-making. In 2011, it met eight times, with its meetings often focused on a single major policy area or on preparations for major national meetings. According to the Party’s constitution, the PSC and Politburo derive their power from the Central Committee, whose full and alternate members together â€Å"elect† the Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee, and Party General Secretary, and â€Å"decide† on the composition of the Party’s Central Military Commission.34 In practice, incumbent top officials provide a list of nominees to the Central Committee, which ratifies the leadership’s nominees.35 The current nearly 400-member Central Committee (including alternates) is made up of leaders from the provinces (41.5%), central ministries (22.6%), the military (17.5 %), central Party organizations (5.9%), and stateowned enterprises, educational institutions, â€Å"mass organizations† such as the Communist Youth League, and other constituencies (12.4%). The National People’s Congress (NPC) The third major political institution in China is the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s unicameral national legislature. According to Article 57 of China’s constitution, the NPC is â€Å"the highest organ of state power.† The Constitution tasks the NPC with overseeing the Presidency, the State Council, the State Central Military Commission, the Supreme People’s Court, and China’s national level public prosecutor’s office, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate. In practice, however, the NPC’s powers are severely limited, and the entire entity operates under the leadership of the Communist Party. The public theater of the NPC’s work is centered around its ten-day-long annual full session, held every March and attended by all of the NPC’s nearly 3,000 deputies. The next full session, in March 2013, will mark the start of a new five-year Congress, and is expected to approve a major leadership transition, including a new President and Premier, and new Vice Premiers and State Councilors. At the annual full sessions, NPC deputies almost always vote to approve the reports, laws, and candidates put before them, usually by overwhelming margins, leading many observers to describe the NPC as a â€Å"rubber stamp† parliament. NPC delegates do occasionally push back, however. At the March 2012 session of the NPC, for example, a record 20% of deputies withheld their support from the Ministry of Finance’s budget report, reportedly in protest over the Ministry’s longstanding refusal to accept any NPC suggestions for revisions to the budget.47 (Unlike the U.S. Congress, the National People’s Congress does not pass spending bills. Rather, at the annual full session each year, it votes to approve the budget presented by the Minister of Finance.) The NPC also makes revisions to the Premier’s annual report on the work of the government, the State’s most important policy document. Out of the public eye, individual committees and the Standing Committee exercise more meaningful influence. They shape legislation and can exercise a degree of oversight over government entities through â€Å"inspection† visits and committee reports. The power of individual NPC deputies to exercise oversight is largely restricted to the right to submit â€Å"proposals† advocating for reforms or demanding better implementation of laws or regulations, to which officials are required to respond in writing. Because the annual full session of the congress is so brief, much of the NPC’s work is undertaken by its approximately 175-member Standing Committee, which meets about half a dozen times a year.48 Other important NPC bodies include nine specialized committees and a legislative affairs work committee, all of which review and revise draft legislation before sending it to the Standing Committee or the full Congress for action. Like the State Council, the NPC has a Party organization embedded within it. The NPC’s chairman serves on the Politburo Standing Committee and is currently the Party’s number-two ranked official. NPC deputies are not directly elected. The Communist Party draws up lists of nominees, based in part on potential nominees’ perceived loyalty to the Party. Thirty-five electoral units, most of them provincial-level People’s Congresses, then vote upon the Party’s nominees. The process is modestly competitive in that the Party nominates 20% to 50% more candidates than available positions and those with the most votes are elected to serve as NPC deputies. NPC election rules stipulate quotas for the representation of ethnic minority groups, the military, women, and other groups, including the Party itself. Because China rejects any separation of powers, the President, Premier, and other top leaders are all NPC deputies. 49 Deputies serve for five-year terms. The NPC is the uppermost layer of a nation-wide system of People’s Congresses. These congresses are loosely linked together in process and function. Only deputies for the lowest level of People’s Congresses are directly elected. Traditionally, even at the lowest level, candidate lists are controlled by the Party, and elections are uncontested. Since 2011, however, China has seen a wave of independent candidates contesting elections for People’s Congresses in city districts and townships. Most such candidates have faced forms of official harassment, including intrusive surveillance, extra-legal detention, intimidation of their supporters, and election irregularities designed to keep them from appearing on ballots, but some have succeeded in being elected to office. Corruption Corruption in China is widespread and takes many forms, from lavish gifts and expensive meals bestowed on officials by those seeking favors, to bribes explicitly offered in exchange for permits and approvals, to embezzlement of state funds, exemption of friends and relatives from enforcement of laws and regulations, and the appointment of relatives to lucrative jobs in stateowned companies. A 2011 report released by China’s Central Bank estimated that from the mid- 1990s to 2008, corrupt officials who fled overseas took with them $120 billion in stolen funds.28 The CCP uses its Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC) to police its own ranks for corruption, an arrangement fraught with conflicts of interest. As noted above, the Party metes out its own punishments for wrongdoing by its members, and has sole discretion about whether to hand members over to the state judiciary for investigation and possible prosecution. (See â€Å"Weak Rule of Law and Ineffective Policy Implementation and Enforcement.†) Critics charge that CDIC investigations are frequently politically motivated, even if they uncover real wrongdoing. Officials who keep on the right side of their superiors and colleagues may engage in large-scale corruption, while other officials may be investigated for lesser infractions because they have fallen afoul of powerful officials.

Innocence of Liesel Meminger Essay

Innocence is something that all of us know and relish. It is something sweet and peaceful that we all deem precious. In the novel ‘The Book Thief’, one little girl possesses this trait, in a very surprisingly place. In the heart of Nazi Germany, Liesel Meminger’s innocence is easily distinguished. In the story, Liesel Meminger is forced to adapt to a new family and environment due to her past traumatic experiences. Throughout part one of the book, Liesel shows her juvenility on numerous occasions shown by her interactions with others, in what she says, and through her attitudes. Rosa Hubermann was walking around their neighborhood to show Liesel her job, collecting clothes from the wealthy to iron. Upon arrival at a house, Rosa Hubermann told Liesel, â€Å"‘You go.’ Liesel was horrified. A giant brown door with a brass knocker stood atop a small flight of steps. ‘What?’ Mama shoved her ‘Don’t you ‘What’ me, saumensch. Move it.’† (The Book Thief, Hardcover Pg.42) This shows that Liesel is juvenile because she is terrified at her mama’s orders even though the job is simply to collect clothing. Also, she was in such disbelief at her mama’s decision when she was forced to retrieve the clothing because she never thought her new mama would put her in a position to bring her tremendous discomfort. Liesel is performing her usual routine, cleaning the spat saliva off the front porch from the mouth of Frau Holtzapfel. â€Å"†¦once in a while some stars had the nerve to rise and float, if only for a few minutes. On those nights, she would stay a little longer and wait. ‘Hello, stars.’† (The Book Thief, Hardcover Pg.45) Due to Liesel’s young imagination, she takes the time to converse with the stars. Any adult would not even regard the stars let alone talk to them because they have lost the innocence found in childhood, but Liesel is different and takes the time to do such things. Still in disbelief of her brother’s recent death, she is on her knees at her brother’s icy cold grave, digging in denial. â€Å"Somewhere in all the snow, she could see her broken heart, in two pieces.† (The Book Thief Hardcover Pg.24) This shows how Liesel is innocent because when all she loves is seized in that graveyard she is lost and does not know what to do. It was the cold graveyard, the thought of her mom leaving her forever in the midst of her younger brother’s death that overwhelmed Liesel to a broken heart. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is important to read because it reveals something special in an very unexpected place. Germans who lived in Nazi Germany are still to this day commonly stereotyped as being ruthless and hate filled. Liesel has given a previously unseen perspective of these times, a look through the eyes of an innocent child that knows nothing of bitter hatred and antagonism. This is all easily perceived through her interactions with other characters , her own dialogue, and attitudes.

John Updike s A P - 1290 Words

Innocence and experience go hand in hand and typically reflect one another. One might say experience tarnishes innocence while others may argue innocence restrains experience. Can it however be seen that innocence may be conformity while experience is rebellion? While innocent, children will do as he or she is told and develops thoughts based on their parent or guardian’s teachings. During adolescence parent’ hair starts turning gray because that once obedient child has developed a mind and personality of his or her own. A personality that may result to â€Å"rebellious† behavior because the teenager or young adult stays out too late or never spends any time with the family because they are too busy with friends. While transitioning from†¦show more content†¦Work continues as usual until one day three girls walk into the store â€Å"†¦ in nothing but bathing suits† (Updike, 108). The girl who appears to lead the others is given the name †Å"Queenie† by Sammy. This disruption in Sammy’s life reflects the importance of rebellion. While straying from the norms of life can lead to uncertainty, it is a risk people must take to achieve true happiness because disruptions force people out of conformity and eventually to see the infinite perspectives of life. Conformity is a very comfortable way of living for people because it takes away from the fear of the unknown and the risks of life. There is no chance of becoming greater and there is no chance of failing which makes life adequate. The customers and the employees appear to be completely content with the routines of their lives. In A P, John Updike explains how conformed the customers are: I bet you could set off dynamite in an A P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering â€Å"Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!† or whatever it is they do mut ter. (Updike, 109) Sammy is stating that the customers are so into their own world that nothing can keep them from straying from the norm. Without disruptions in life people tend to keep their heads down and just keep going. It ponders the questions if one day they will ever lift their heads up and wonder how they even got