What does education mean to me?

Education; Essential of Life

Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another. I believe that education is an essential in our life. Without proper education, we cannot survive in this challenging and rapidly changing world. In society, we need social and moral values such as honesty, perseverance and integrity to be able to prosper. Therefore education is playing a significant part in shaping us to be able to prepare for the future as well as in society. To me, a person without education is a like a person without sight – he can’t differentiate what is right and what is wrong.

I strongly agree with this statement that educating a person only in terms of a cognitive mind and not in terms of values and morals is to create new sources of threat and danger to society. It is in fact true. Cognitive means the person only learned the basic concepts and he wasn’t equipped with other life skills, thus he will ended up being unable to differentiate the problems and unable to solve the problems and he will have to rely heavily on other for his survival. He may also be a threat and problems to the society because since he could not differentiate what is right and what is wrong, he could not contribute anything to the society and he may even have the potential to harm and threaten the society in many ways.

To me, education means fun and enjoyable learning journey. I enjoyed learning and acquiring new skills as I got to know more about the world, the society and myself through education. For example, we learn Social Studies subject to get to know more about the world, appreciate the hard works of our government done for us, get to know what is happening around the world through this subject. That is a part of education to keep us stay in keep with the world and acquire the world of knowledge. Although I have learned many things over the last decade, I could not consider myself as an educated person because I firmly believe that there are more to be learned out in the world.

In Singapore, the education system equips us with the knowledge and life skills and moral values when we set foot in the working environment. For instance, secondary school education equips us with the moral values and basic fundamentals of life skills and work skills to prepare us for the future. As we move on to the next step of higher education such as polytechnic, the education system there equips us with more fundamentals of life skills and prepare us to face with the challenging and rapidly changing world to ensure us that we are ‘Life Ready, Work Ready and World Ready’. Polytechnic education system allowed us to be more independent on ourselves and the work attachment programs allowed to learn more about working life outside the school to ensure that we are ready and prepared once we graduate and step out of the school to begin our journey as workmanship.

In conclusion, education is playing a significant role in shaping our future. If we want to be successful in future, we must pursue it with great responsibility or else we won’t be able to become successful and we will be falling behind and losing track on this challenging and globalised world.

 

Haha, my ONOW report on 'what does education means to me?' haha....look so nice ^^