First, let us ask ourselves, what do we expect from university? Or what do we expect to gain from the university life? Knowledge? A diploma? Fame? Money? What else? Isn’t there something else that we can gain from 4 years of university life? Shouldn’t education be something else? What is the purpose of education then?

All of the above questions I attempt to answer but feel most feeble to do so. In order to probe into the question we have to go deep down into the root of it—what is education? The traditional Chinese system put it as a means to produce state servants, while Plato thought its ultimate goal was to train philosophy kings, rulers of state. But well before all these, what is there in the process?

Modern education system perversely divides the universe into arts and science, and even worse, it now concentrat

If the foremost purpose of education is to help students solve the myths of this very universe, then what they solve is most likely to be the mystic power of being practical. What was supposed to be a skill in the past has now wormed its way into the university curriculum and became a field of study. They are only means of survival arisen from this ever-complex world of ours because we have so sadly degraded to a state where material importance overrides that of spiritual’s.

Where have all the intellects gone? Where have all the truths of this world gone? It seems that nobody’s interested in them any more. We can find no more passion in today’s students, not the least but, they have no passion for life but reality. They are trained to accept and yield to what lies in front of them, but not to reflect upon and get to the root of the phenomenon. They are trained to receive but not to ask. They dare not ask because that implies a sidestep from the well and carefully designed path their parents have long prepared for them—and hope them to follow down to the inch—by which act would stamp them as outcasts of this society.

I turned to one of my friends for help on this issue, and he told me without hesitation that the ultimate purpose of education is to teach students to ‘think’. Yes, it is true in a way that the most important task for teachers are is the guide their students to a correct direction throughout the thinking process. But why do we need to be taught in order to think? Can’t our brain function properly without some else’s interruption? Were we not born to observe and think? How many pf us have been poisoned by education—as we can see—that when what was taught contradicts what we believe; when we were forced to accept the convention and bend towards the theory of ‘power is knowledge’, we think no more. Education stoned our mind; it maimed our creativity and murdered our conscience.

Some topics in this essay:
Stephen Leacock, Thomas Huxley, Fame Money, , purpose education, education meant, thinking process, education system, university education, ‘the whole’, university life,