What is education? What are the most important principles in education? Many thoughts have been given and many words have been spoken by the best minds of the past and present. I have found that the most pertinent and brilliant words about education often come from philosophers. Specialized educators and pedagogues who do not also possess the wisdom to see into human nature are apt to limit their words to experience or to stick to the details of psychology, making them superficial, trivial, and banal. Now I am going to list the educational concepts that I appreciate most, which are seven points in total, and I may as well call them the seven aphorisms of education. They are indeed characterized as aphorisms: they go straight to the essence of things, and are as concise as oracles and as plain as common sense. Lamentably, people get lost in the illusion of things, preferring to believe in all kinds of difficult and complicated fallacies, but forgetting simple common sense. However, the still simple mind will surely feel how these aphorisms hit the ills of today’s education, and how our education needs to go back to common sense, to the most basic reasoning of education as education. The first aphorism: education is growth, growth is the purpose, there is no purpose beyond growth. This argument was put forward by Rousseau and further elaborated by Dewey. ” Education is growth” succinctly states the original meaning of education, which is to enable the healthy growth of each individual’s nature and innate abilities, rather than to instill into a vessel what is out there, such as knowledge. Socrates had long ago pointed out that the search for knowledge is an inherent faculty in the soul of every human being, and the wise men of the time claimed that they could instill knowledge into the soul that was not there in the first place, which Socrates scoffed at as if they could put sight into a blind man’s eyes. Knowing that ” education is growth,” we know exactly what things education should do. For example, intellectual education is to develop curiosity and the ability to think rationally, not to inculcate knowledge; moral education is to encourage noble spiritual pursuits, not to inculcate norms; and aesthetic education is to cultivate rich souls, not to inculcate skill. “Growth is purpose, and there is no purpose beyond growth” is particularly opposed to measuring education on a narrow utilitarian scale. Even if one recognizes that “education is growth”, one must set an external purpose for growth, such as adapting to society in the future, pursuing a career, making achievements, and so on, as if growth has no value if one does not work towards such a purpose. Regulating growth with utilitarian goals will inevitably result in the suppression of growth, which in fact still denies that “education is growth”. Does growth itself have no value? Isn’t a person whose nature has developed healthily both good and happy? Even if measured on a utilitarian scale, a broad rather than a narrow one, would not such a person have a better chance of achieving real success in society? And looking at the state of society as a whole, as Russell points out, a society of men and women who are good by nature would surely be much better off than the opposite. Aphorism number two: Children are not adults who have not yet grown up; childhood has its own intrinsic value. One of the most direct and harmful results of regulating education by external utilitarian purposes and ignoring the value of growth itself is the denial of the intrinsic value of childhood. The misconception of the child as ” a future being,” an adult who has not yet grown up and who seems to have little value until he or she ” grows up to be an adult,” and whose only goal in education is to prepare the child for the future of adult life, is a long-standing and widespread one. The very reference to ” growing into manhood” is absurd, as if children were not human beings until they grow up! Montessori was the first to explicitly criticize this notion, establishing her theory of children’s education based on the affirmation of the value of the child’s personhood. Dewey also pointed out that childhood has its own intrinsic qualities and meanings, and that it should not be regarded as an immature stage of life that one wants to let pass quickly. Each stage of life has its own irreplaceable value, and no stage is merely a preparation for another. Childhood, in particular, is the most important stage of physical and mental growth, and should be the happiest time of life. The greatest virtue that education can accomplish is to give children a happy and meaningful childhood, thus creating a good foundation for a happy and meaningful life. However, the prevailing situation today is that the whole adult world has imposed its own small utilitarian goals on children, driving them to fight on the battlefield of utilitarianism. I am afraid that in their future lives, and in society a few years from now, the evil consequences of the savage deprivation of the value of childhood will manifest themselves in some terrible ways. The third aphorism: The purpose of education is to free students from the slavery of reality, not to adapt to it. This is a famous quotation from Cicero. Today, on the contrary, education is doing its best to do one thing, and that is to mold students with the goal of adapting to reality. There is certainly a need to adapt to reality when one lives in society, but this should not be the main purpose of education. Montaigne said that learning is not about adapting to the outside world, but about enriching oneself. Confucius also advocated that learning is a matter of ” for oneself ” rather than ” for others “. Philosophers throughout the ages have emphasized that learning is for the development of the individual’s inner spiritual capacity, so as to gain freedom in the face of external reality. Of course, this is only an inner freedom, but it is by virtue of this inner freedom, this independence of character and ability to think independently, that those brilliant souls and minds have been so great in changing the realities of human society. Education should create the conditions for the promotion of inner freedom, for the production of good souls and minds. What is education for if it only adapts to reality! Fourth maxim: The most important principle of education is not to love time, but to waste it. This statement, coming from Rousseau, sounds downright fallacious by many of our ears today. However, Rousseau had his reasons. If education is growth, then the mission of education should be to provide the best environment for growth. What is the best environment? The first is free time and the second is a good teacher. In Greek, the word school means leisure. To the Greeks, students must have ample time for experience and contemplation in order to be free to develop their mental faculties. Rousseau defended his astounding statement by saying, ” More is lost by misusing time than by throwing it away, and a mis-educated child is farther from wisdom than an uneducated one.” Today, many parents and teachers are afraid that their children will waste their time, driving them to do endless homework and leaving them no time for play, thinking that they are doing their duty as parents and teachers. But Rousseau asks you: What does it mean to waste time? Is pleasure nothing? Is jumping and running all day long nothing? If fulfilling the demands of nature is considered wasted, then let them be wasted. At the college level, free time is even more important. In my opinion, you can live without good teachers, but you can’t live without free time. In the end, all education is self-education and all learning is self-learning. This is especially true in the case of the growth of mental faculties. I am in favor of John Henry’s view that for intelligent students with a basic education, the university might as well have no teachers or tests, and let them wander freely in the library. I’ll join George Bernard Shaw in lamenting that the world’s bookshelves are filled with spiritual delicacies, but students are forced to munch on dull textbooks with no nutritional value. Aphorism #5: Forget everything you learned in the classroom, and what’s left is education. I first came across this quote in Einstein’s writings as a witticism that he quoted unnamed. Then I realized that it was probably taken off a quote from Whitehead’s thesis to the effect that what is left after you have left behind the textbook and the lecture notes, and forgotten the details you memorized for the test, is what is left is valuable. The details of knowledge are easy to forget, and once you need them, they are easy to look up in a book. So focusing on memorizing the details of knowledge is both strenuous and worthless. Assuming that you have forgotten all these things you have learned in class, if it turns out that nothing remains, it means that you have been educated for nothing. That which should remain, which is worthy of being called education, is, in Whitehead’s words, the principle of complete penetration into your mind and body, a habit of intellectual activity, a learned and imaginative way of life, and, in Einstein’s words, the general capacity for independent thought and judgment. According to my understanding, in layman’s terms, a person from now on becomes an irredeemable thinker, a scholar, no matter what profession he is engaged in in the future, he can no longer change his habits and hobbies of study, thinking and research, before he can recognize that he has received a university education. The sixth aphorism: the university should be a place where masters gather, so that young people grow under the influence of masters. The true meaning of education is not to impart knowledge, but to cultivate habits of intellectual activity, the ability to think independently, etc. These intellectual qualities obviously cannot be imparted in the same way as knowledge, and the only way to cultivate them is to be nurtured by those who possess such qualities — which may be loosely called masters. Masters can be found in two places, one on the shelves of libraries and the other in universities, which should be places where living masters gather. As Whitehead said: the raison d’être of the university is to have an imaginative group of scholars who explore knowledge, to be influenced by them in their intellectual development, and to bridge the gap between mature wisdom and the pursuit of life’s passions, without which the university need not exist. Lin Yutang has a more graphic statement: the ideal university should be a dining house for a class of extraordinary personalities, where one bumps into a Newton here, a Frott there, a Russell lives in the east room, a Laski in the west room, the front yard is the study of Hui-Ding Zi, and the back yard is the housing of Dai Dong Yuan. He emphasized: ” eating house ” is not a comparison, these masters in addition to eating, absolutely no obligation to the school, the school to send salaries to invite them to live on campus, so that students can communicate with their contacts, by its inculcation. For example, Oxford, Cambridge, the big professors, smoking a pipe to talk about life and learning, the quality of the students is so “smoked” out. Today’s universities are competing to boast the so-called “world-class universities” and have formulated all kinds of hard indicators. In fact, things are very simple: the hardest indicator is the teacher, a university has a number of noble-minded, intelligent first-class scholars, it is a first-class university. Otherwise, the school building is bigger, the building is more elegant, the equipment is more advanced, all for nothing. The seventh motto: Teachers should regard students as ends rather than means. This is Russell’s principle for a proper teacher-student relationship. He pointed out that the essential quality of an ideal teacher is love for his pupils, and that a sure sign of love is the great parental instinct to feel that the pupils are the end just as the parents feel that their children are the end. He emphasized that a teacher should love his pupils more than he loves his country and his church. To that I would add, in today’s context, that it should be more than the love of money and fame. Some teachers today have precisely fame and fortune as their only goal, and they blatantly use their students as a means to gain fame and fortune. Whether a teacher personally loves his or her students depends on the character of that teacher. For the majority of teachers in schools to see their students as ends rather than means, it is necessary to establish a system of education in which the students are the ends. A major reason for the proliferation of student-as-a-means programs is that teachers have too much power over the promotion and graduation of their students. Therefore, I agree with Albert Einstein’s recommendation that teachers should be given as little power as possible to use coercive measures, so that the only source of respect for them is their human and rational qualities. The corollary to this is the expansion of the rights of students, especially graduate students, to choose their teachers and courses freely, to change schools, and to find other teachers, within the limits of the syllabus. Teachers should also be evaluated primarily on whether they are loved by their students rather than favored by the administration. As it is now, the teacher has the ability to activities to a large amount of research funds, there is the power to recruit more students, there are students to work for their own power, or else they will be subjected to anger, and even be deprived of the right to bring students, in this system, how can there be students are not reduced to the means of the reason