The Courses in College
John Ruskin, a British critic, said that “education dose not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave what they do not behave.”i I believe that his claim is ringing the alarm bell for the education in today’s college. There is no doubt that courses in college today are better than they were. But honestly speaking, they still can not meet the social needs. Companies want employees to do realistic work by using the knowledge they have learned in college, but the courses actually can not teach students how to behave after their graduation.

Although John Ruskin stated that “education dose not mean teaching people to know what they do not know”, we still need to learn some basic major knowledge from college. But unfortunately, we can not even know what we do not know from the courses in college.

The first reason to the problem is that there are too many useless and inappropriate courses in college. All the students have to take courses with Chinese characteristics like Marxism and Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theories, which take students a lot of time to recite. Schools set these courses as compulsory philosophic or political courses. Students do need to learn philosophy, but not just learn limited philosophy with Chinese characteristics. Students do need to know the condition of our country and the world, but not just be told what written on the books. Bertrand Russell once said that “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”ii Philosophy and politic are best subjects to teach people how to research, how to analyze and how to think. But these circumscribed courses in college smother students self-thinking abilities, and give them unchallengeable answers to both philosophic world and realistic world.

Simultaneously, colleges are lack of some useful courses that can help students to be better people and better employees in the future. Personally I believe that psychology should be the most important and inevitable course in college, because it can assistant people to understand themselves and others comprehensively. I took a selective psychology class last semester when I suffered a tough time. Psychology taught me to hear the voice from my heart and realize who I am and what I want exactly. I found back my lost courage to face the obstacle in my life and became easily reconciled conflicts with others. Regretfully, I can only take a selective course once so I can not get further psychological education in the college. Also, although I really admired the teacher of this course, the final scores she gave to students were so poor that little students selected this course this semester and the class had to be suspended. As a result, students lost chances to learn an important and helpful course. Besides, I think we also need course aimed to cultivate communication and other pragmatic courses to suit the society after graduation as soon as possible.

Worse than simply do not know the knowledge, students either do not know how to complete work requirements in realistic situation.

Initially, the curriculum setting in college mainly focuses on theories. The biggest proportions of textbooks are theories, but most of the theories and models are set and proved