Concept Of Eastern Education 5s1vf

A world without education is a world of nothing. Why the education is so important? Education could be considered as the first thing that we need to mastered. If we have no education, we will be suppressing by those who have the knowledge. As we all know, mostly those who have the knowledge will be more successful than those who had no knowledge. In term of common usage, there are two types of education, formal and non-formal education. For the formal one, education is merely the delivery of knowledge, skills and information from teachers to students. This process often occurs at school, the place where the knowledge being transmitted. At the school, the formal education is a must but non-formal education also indirectly being transmitted by many factors at school. One of the factors is the teacher themselves. The school ecology also plays an important role for this nonformal education.

Education in the east is different from the education in the west. Many have said that western education is better than the eastern style of education. Actually, what differentiate the eastern and the western education is the system of education that had been practiced by both of it. In the eastern education system, the teacher is the only authority or the right one. The teacher’s words are not to be questioned. Students are not expected to speak up in class or respond to the questions that the teacher asks. During teaching and learning session, the students only accept whatever the teacher teach whether the teacher right or wrong. There is no two way communication between the teacher and student. As the result, the students always feel sleepy in the class because the participation of the students is not there. Therefore, they feel bored and sleepy. Thus, there is no motivation for the students to be active during the classes.

For the eastern education, the other concept is about memorizing. The study or the teaching is mainly based on book learning and memorization. The students and teachers only focussing on the exams because in the eastern education, the

marks from the exams are what make the difference between the smart students and less smart students. Teachers always have to hustle through the textbooks to meet the deadline of every monthly examination. So, as the result, the student’s only learning from the memorizing, not based from their understanding. If this happened, they will easily forget what they had memorized. But, if they understand the teaching is all about, they will it longer than they memorized it. The efficiency of learning will be interrupted if the students only memorized what they had learned. The community nowadays only measure one’s ability from what they had scored or they got. Even our attitude and behaviour is graded by numbers. The fact is, the students from the eastern education background did not have the ability of solving problems that they confronted and we found it hard when it comes to organizing activities.

The eastern education system puts a vast deal of emphasis on conformity. In the east, there are a lot of rules to be follow that the school had made for their students. The rules like wearing uniforms to school and must be tucked in are common at the school. In the eastern education, discipline is very important when you attending the school. It seems to be working on producing the perfect students and obeyed students. Any action that is considered as out of ordinary is regarded as a rebellion towards the system. the consequences are the student will be questioned or punished by the teacher as the authority in learning. Occupations such as doctors and lawyer are regarded as decent jobs to do while being an artist is not so respected by others because in the eastern education, the one who scored low marks will be an artist and such. This prevents those with special talents from developing into professionals.

Traditionally, the relationship between teachers and students has always been tense between students and teachers in eastern culture. Teachers are meant to be respected and sometimes students even have to bear teachers’ bad temper. No matter how familiar we are with a teacher, it is not easy for us to automatically talk to them about our concerns. Some don’t even speak freely with their peers.

The first goal is to make the socialization process occurs. Eastern education not much towards this goal but still, indirectly, it gives the students chance to interact with one another in order to help them become fully functioning adults in the future. In other words, in the school, they socialized with friends from different background from theirs. In this case, school is made as the agent of socialization for the students. They get to know one another and try to understand their condition in term of their way of life and much more. In Confucius’s philosophy of education, the goal of education is to produce an able person or individual with good moral values. As we all know, eastern education is more to teacher centred and not student centred type of learning. So, they tend to learn to be a good student by obeying what the teacher had thought them and never condemned or questioned what the teacher have to say. The teacher is the only authority in the process of learning and the students would be the good listener. From this situation, the students will have a good moral whereby they respect they own teacher and never go against their teacher. Even when the teacher is wrong, they will never quarrel about that because they know, the teacher is to be respect. In the eastern, the one who gives knowledge to them have the right to be respected. This is what the Confucius thought. From Confucius, we move on to Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophy of education. Rabindranth set the goal of education as producing holistic individuals through interaction and integration with the environment. This philosopher talks about producing an individual that is good in every aspects through socialization that we made and how we mixed around with the people and society around us. The aspects includes physical, intellectual, moral and also spiritual. The western also focussing on physical and intellectual development. But, they are lacking in term of moral and spiritual development. These two aspects are related to life practices. He interprets the education as the process that aims to produce a holistic individual.

Reflective essay

This coursework is compulsory to be made by students from PISMP for the subject Philosophy and Education in Malaysia. The course was given to us on 1 st of April 2012. In order to make sure that the coursework is on the track, the students is needed to collect the data from both western and eastern philosophy of education that been learned during the lecture in class. It is clear enough from the searching for information that had been done, there are much differences between the two education systems; eastern and western education. But basically, the education is all the same, to achieve a knowledge person in whatever fields of education. from my understanding, the eastern more focusing on physical, intellectual, morality and also spiritual while the western education only focusing on two aspects, that are physical and intellectual. But the system of education in the west seems to be the best system rather than the eastern system of education. This is because from my finding, the western’s method of teaching and learning is more efficient whereby the learning process is student centered and not teacher centred. The method of teacher centered is not appropriate to be used for nowadays situation. Nowadays is the era of technology where almost all the works is being done by the computer and human as the supervisor. We can see that teenagers nowadays is being called as ‘screen-agers’ because almost all the tools and equipments is made with screen. Even a two years old baby knows how to use a computer. From the searching, I now realise that not all about the education I have covered, contrarily, there a lot that I need to analyse and learn. As such, when it comes to western education, there are also bunch of philosopher that I did not know and learned. In the eastern education, I also have learned a lot of new knowledge. For example, we in the east, the way we developed our moral and spiritual is when we obey our teacher and follow the rules that had been made by school in term of wearing uniforms and such.

It should be clear from the preceding discussion that there are some definite differences between the two education systems. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Western education encourages people to pursue their true interests, producing a broad range of skills and areas of expertise. Eastern education, on the other hand, discourages the pursuit of learning that has no strictly practical purpose, such as visual and performing arts. Eastern education, however, is an efficient way of training people to perform tasks that require quick and precise thinking. In addition to individual consequences, the education system also has an impact at the social level. For example, the two education systems produce different values. Eastern education gives out the concept that working is the main purpose of life. While this creates some social stability, it also means that the spiritual life of each person is easy to impoverish. On the contrary, Westerners know better how to relish life and this world. I believe if we want our society to be more progressive and be in line with the most advanced countries, there is definitely a need to reform our education system. There are a lot of challenges that I faced and also I have learned from doing this assignment. First, when I first receive this assignment, I thought that doing this assignment is just a piece of cake but clearly I am wrong. It is much tougher than what I thought. When I start searching for the information from the various sources such as library and surfing the internet, I hardly found the data that I needed. For finding the information almost took me about three days to do it. But, I faced an additional problem that is the electricity problem. As a result, I did not have the chance to go to the library to find the information that I needed to find. So, I am forced to rely almost everything from the sources from the internet. Because of the electricity problem, I have a limited time to carry out my assignment because I have to depend on notebook’s battery. The battery only last almost one hour. So, I need to continue my assignment at night where the generator works at night. Sometimes, I have gone to the TELTRAC to complete my assignment there at daylight. When I start to compose my essay, I barely translate or rephrase my sentence but slowly I do it and finally did it. The reason is the usage of the words from the information and data that I had collected is a fact and universal truth. So, to make a new sentence from the sentence given is hard.

In the nutshell, I feel very grateful as I had finished my work that had been divided to me. Overall, I would say this is assignment is very good in giving me new knowledge and more or less, give me a refreshment and clear idea from what I have learned during the lecture in the class. From my point of view, different philosophers have the different words but concept and the goals is still the same, that is to make individual more developed in term of intellectually, spiritually, morality and also physically.