There is a debate over whether schools in different parts of the nation should determin which academic courses to offer. Some people figure that a nation should require all the students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college, while other people argue that schools in different areas should have the right to determine their own academic content to teach. As far as I am concerned, both of these two ideas ignore some factors on the long term development of students. A acceptable solution would be that schools in different parts of the nation should determine their own academic courses to teach, in the meanwhile, some limits about core content should be complied with.

Different part of a nation has its own complexion which should be carefully taken into account, especially in a multiracial country or a country with hoge domain.

First, distinct traditional culture should be maintained, and the best method of maintaining them is teaching the students those contents. The Soviet Russia controlled by Stalin and Jugoslavia reigned by Tito coerce their citizens to learn the unified contents, despite of the fact that their member countries have their own distinct traditional culture. And a consequence by doing this is the increasing of potential racial or geographical conflict. The final evil consequence brought about by the shortage of democracy in teaching program offers a typical example to illustrate that schools should determine their own teaching plan.

Second, students on the different level of IQ, EQ, background knowledge need personal studying plan, hence schools should make appropriate studying program for their students. A typical counterexample of my friend Tom can be quoted to illustrate this point. Tom is good at mathematics, but his schools give him a lot of courses about other academic fields such as history, literature, language and so on. To much time occupied by those courses make Tom exhaust, and his potential on mathematics gradually disappeared at last.

Some generalizations in common should never be ignored when schools are thing about their own teaching program.

In the first place, some essential contents should be taught to students, such as what is good or bad, what is right or wrong, what is virtue or evil and what should or should not do. Hence, many courses about the contents we mentioned above, despite the different instances in different parts, should be added into schools' teaching program.

In the second place, unification and development of a country determine that some courses are necessary for schools' teaching program. How could a country be if its citizens know nothing about language and history of their nation? We have mentioned that a region's or a race's traditional culture is very significant in the above content, in the meanwhile, the traditional culture of the whole country should not be ignored either. In ancient China, the first unified empire-Qin Dynasty, established by the first empertor in China-Qin Shihuang, had no unified character, law, measurement and so on. To strengthen the regime, Qin Shihuang commanded all the schools in country to teach the same contents including Chinese, characters, laws and measurement. Those steps in a large sense promote the process of unifying China.

The central aim of schools is to cultivate their students, and this target direct the arrangement of teaching. Establishing a schools teaching plan according to the school's practical condition and situation under certain general principles given by the nation could be a excellent scheme for the students.

[ 本帖最后由 flasherfffff 于 2008-7-3 18:03 编辑 ]

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