What should education do for building a world full of love and peace?

416 in Virginia Tech shocked the whole world. Our society needs love and peace, but what should education do for it?

I think first we should educate our children to love the current society they live. That is, to educate the children to take responsibility for development of the world, or at least his/her own family. In order to achieve that, children would be taught how to use and create kinds of necessary tools for subsistence in this world. Consequently academic skills become the first thing for children to learn, which give children basic tools, such as calculation and communication, to live in this society.

However, paying attention to academic skills doesn’t mean we should ask our children achieve exactly equally and similarly. Just as what Charles W. Eliot said, “promote pupils not by battalions, but in the most irregular and individual way possible.” The highest level of civilization is to respect. As for education, to respect our children is to admit they are gifted differently. That is the first reason for concentrating basic academic skills. A child will not know what interested him, mathematics or history, until he learned basic subjects to some basic extent. So learning broad academic skills will be helpful for children’s choice and for realizing society’s diversity. And the second reason can be expounded borrowing a metaphor. The area of triangular base of a pyramid determines the height the pyramid reach. In this way, a person’s knowledge seems like the area of the triangular base, and his contribution seems like the height of the pyramid: the broader his knowledge is, the more he might contribute to the society. Consequently, it is essential to let children learn broad academic skills.

Secondly, children should be educated to love themselves. To wit, children should know what their rights are and how to enjoy their rights, which was also illustrated in “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Fix the Site of the University of Virginia” .

Thirdly and finally, children should learn to love and educate their offspring. Nowadays we are arguing about education and schooling, and in the argument almost everyone knows education should not only include school education, but also include factors from family, community and society. For example, if a child grew up in a society full of discrimination towards minorities, the possibility for him to treat others equally after he grew up would be almost zero. So in this way, environment affects children’s growth greatly. As illustrated in the former example, the child’s consciousness of discrimination probably came from public opinions, even though his school is integrated. Consequently, if we want to get a society without discrimination, it is essential to educate our children to respect and love others; and the starting point to achieve that is that adults should respect and love every other members in the society especially when they are together with their children. That is, any adults should “realize” their responsibility for educating children. Adults in current society cannot achieve that, but we should do our best to let our children achieve that “realization” when they became adults.