The means of education in this country does NOT promote the skills of critical thinking in the students, which is why, they're all, too inept, to handle the problems after they'd made straight-A's, and now, they're, in the real world! Written by an honorary professor here, on how the education systems, aren't doing SHIT to help the students who will be, graduating, soon, off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
When I went to study in the U.S., I'd found that the American pupils loved asking questions, the students from China, rarely do. Perhaps, it's how we'd lacked the language skills, but I think, that most of the students here, rarely, ask the questions too. This is worth noting, because, the students who ask questions means that they are, thinking.
What the teachers teach us in school, we naturally should, try to understand. But, if we only remembered what the instructors taught us, and what's in the books, this is, good enough. But, if we have the habits of thinking, this will, definitely create doubts in what we'd learned, and, if these doubts were, resolved completely, then, we would finally comprehend what the instructors were teaching, and what the textbooks said, wholly.
But, the education here in Taiwan, does NOT focus on honing the thinking skills of students, because I'm an electrical engineering major, I only have the electrical engineering examples, I'm sorry for that. We all know, that we can make a circuit board that works with the transistor, and, this transistor often needed to connect to a resistance, but now, the resistance of the multiple wirings, are made with the transistors. Most of the EE students know this, but, I'd once asked many graduates of the electrical engineering department about it, none of them could explain why we would need to use two transistors. This showed, that students had, gotten some, knowledge, but didn't really, comprehend the concepts. Another situation that's, caused by learning without comprehension into the concepts.
A lot of the EE students knew that the wirings of the wireless communications needed adjusting, but they don't know why the wirings had to be adjusted. There are many students who knew the specific function of a circuit, but didn't know WHY the circuits functioned as such.
What worries me the most, is that a lot of people encouraged the students to use an assortments of software. In the past, all the info-tech major students can write the most basic of programming. But now, a lot of the instructors would encourage the students to look what's already available online, and when you get the formulas, the program would be, up and running. This may work for the smaller scale programming, but, any of the larger programs, the designers needed to understand the structures of the programs, and if the universities don't encourage the students to think, although, it would be easy for the students to get through school, but, they will have it hard in the workforce.
Plainly stated, I'd not gotten into the habits on thinking in my own education. But, as I got older, I'd had a ton of questions I wanted the answers to from in my schooling career. For instance, I knew that the electrons and the protons are charged and the neutrons aren't, but, I'd not thought about asking my professors why this was. I also knew, that the first Emperor of China unified China, and now, I'm curious over how he was able to? How did the emperor get his ideas expressed, how did he make the government officials do as he'd told them to? The Great Wall of China had stood for thousands of years, still standing to this very day, I'd not even asked why it was, so sturdy.
As instructors, we must, encourage our students to think, having the students asking us questions we can't answer, that means, we'd done our jobs, correctly.
Yeah, that would be, a major problem in education, the systems are, cranking out those, scantron answering machines, when in real life, there's more than A,B.C.D.E, you need to be able to think critically, and, because "they did not teach us that in school" therefore, you don't have the skillset to tackle this "subject", which made you, lose big time, in your future career development, because you learned everything based off of the textbooks, and, textbooks are only the theories, there's NO application nor the critical thinking skills, between the pages of those hard-cover heavy texts you're, hauling to and from your college classes.
