Education:
Enhance Enjoyment of Education in China I happened to watch the video of “2011 Nobel Prize in Physics” on YouTube last month, finding that two of the three prize winners are from United States makes me curious about how many Chinese people had ever won the Nobel Prize. I was surprised to find there were more than 3 hundred American Nobel Prize winners while less than 5 Chinese people have ever won the price. Since the United States successfully implements high-achieving yet fun curriculum, meaning that enjoyment and achievement could both exit in education at the same time. However, in China, there still remains a lot of work should be done to improve its education. What should Chinese people do to improve the education making students more anxious about learning and study happily? There are already some scholars in China encourage creative teaching. And yet, to implement high-achieving but enjoyable education in China is time-consuming and difficult to some degree. Education plays a crucial role in cultivating the innovation talents. Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to fostering the students’ independent and creative thinking in China. There is a story which I saw in the article Pay attention to creative education, “The teacher said, ‘If a child is required to paint an apple, the teacher in the United States will give one to him. He can eat it and paint it by imagination. But the child in Japan is not allowed to eat the apple. He should paint it by looking at it. While in China, the child will not be given an apple. He has to paint every stroke of the apple following the model painted by the teacher on the blackboard.’”(Lin, 2009) And now it is the time for China to innovate its education. There is an article could help Chinese people know how to improve its education. In Gorard’s work, How can we enhance enjoyment of secondary school? The student view, he provides concepts of combining enjoyment with education. Gorard considers the enjoyment of formal education largely from young people’s own perspective, based on the view of around 3000 students in England. The data include documentary analysis, official statistics, interviews and surveys with staff and students. He offers much useful information which could help to improve the education in China. He claims that “Enjoyment of school tends to be promoted by factors such as successful social relationships, small classes, variation in learning and students having some control of their learning.” (Gorard 2011)
He also argues that education is not particularly stratified by the standard student background variables so that “enjoyment should be easy to enhance more widely, positively affecting the learner identities of all young people, including the more reluctant learners.” (Gorard 2011) In conclusion, it is important to enhance the enjoyment of education and help students feel more anxious to get their hands on innovative education. And Gorard offers the proper way to combine enjoyment and education.
There is another useful article which explains how to make it possible for both enjoyment and education exit in education at the same time. We all know that Chinese students are good at math. But most of them hate math because math is so hard that make students feel down all the time. In the article Summer Camps: A Fun Way to Reinforce Math Skills, Tichenor provides an interesting way to study math. The study process includes several parts to help students in this summer camps study math happily: “the children have many opportunities to work with hands-on activities, discuss their thinking with teachers and peers, play math games, make math books, keep math journals, and rotate through various math stations.” (Tichenor 2010) It is very important for students to enjoy the process of study so that they could be anxious to learn more. This article improves that enjoyment could be in education. What is more important, enjoyment can even help