Some people believe that the purpose of education is to free the mind and the spirit. Others believe that formal education tends to restrain our minds and spirits rather than set them free.Write a response in which you discuss which view more closely alig

Formal education system is an one that has a fixed curriculum for most students over a discussed set of knowledge body, setting a common goal that all participants should strive to achieve. In East Asian countries, it is mostly a state run education system where students aim to out-perform one another in the college entrance exam. In Western countries, it is an SAT-GRE system with formal evaluation to students and provide college with a reference percentile. The statement proposes that such system confines the nature where people ought to think freely and be imaginative. With certain reservation and taking reality into consideration, I concede that the argument is correct.

No other formal education can escape teaching a knowledge body that is well agreed upon a wide group of society. With the trend of globalization, most modern country has adopted the knowledge system predominated by the profoundly influential scientific understanding of the universe established by the western philosophers and scentists during the Indsutrial Revolution and the Movement of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th century. The property of a scientific view of the universe is that it’s self-perpetuating with groundtruth-based hypothesis and repeatable experiments. Currently, the development of physics and astronomy proved that there exists an endless realm left to explore. For physics, it is a fundamental incoherency between the theory of relativity and quantum physics, for astronomy, it is millions of puzzling observation data acquired through probes and telescopes. These wild lands for theory requires imagination and creativity from young scientists to make progress. Without a formal education imposing a scientific reasoning process, one could make fallacies and free thinking would deteriorate into confusion.

Besides the scientific realm, however, I should point out that there exists a different framework of knowledge that does not depend strictly on repeatable experiment results, such as social science. A formal system could impose a predetermined understanding to a society that the student is living in, and such understanding is often interpreted by the government. Governments aim to educate generations of students who respect the system and make concrete contribution to the economy. While intention is neutral, there could be intended distortion of facts that lead to misbelief in students. For example, the political course in China undermines the captilism component in national economy, and Japanese education undermines the war history that may lead to defeat of national morale. Students who was forced to believe illogical theories may give up the will to reason due to materialistic reasons. Loss of capability to reason and dicernment over contradictions between nuances ultimately contribute to the restriction to the free thoughts that every person possess.

In reality, formal education also incur an emphasis on competition, rather than on the enlightenment of students. In most East Asian countries, the college entrance examination is often too crowded and competition on good education resource is too fierce to let any participant take it light-heartedly. Since any formal education system follows a recognizable pattern that’s ultimately graspable by any human through repetition, systems in these countries often leads to extreme arduous homeworks. As most educators would believe, through repetition, even the “slowest” student could understand the “truth”. Unfortunately, such repetition, as dull as one could imagine, teaches nothing about intuition and inspiration over the knowledge itself, which precisely accounts for why most graduates from East Asian education system were often criticised for lack of imagination and creativity.

The ultimate goal of education is to inspire, to enlighten, to evoke the best spontaneous motivation deep within each person in accords with what the public expects of him. In some occasion, when knowledge and disciplined thinking is required, formal education could contribute. However, with cold reality in consideration, many formal education systems failed to accomplish such goal. Thus more consideration is called upon for system designers to restore the fundamental function of education systems.