IELTS Writing 2 Topic: Levels of Education
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Some people say that in all levels of education, from primary schools to universities, too much time is spent on learning facts and not enough on learning practical skills. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Sample Essay
It is a common belief that all educational institutions, from primary to university level, place far too much emphasis on learning facts and figures, while not focussing enough on developing practical skills, and learning how to think critically. I concur with this assessment entirely. I believe our education system spends way too much time drilling useless facts into the heads of students, and I shall illustrate my position with a few examples.
But first, I need to clarify something. There are some professions where possessing a boatload of knowledge is necessary. Medicine is one such profession. Doctors need to know about a plethora of diseases and their symptoms, and the medicines to cure them with the accurate dosages. Nobody would want a doctor who didn’t know his stuff. Similarly, an advocate needs to be extremely well-versed in the law.
But most jobs are not like this. What usually happens, is whatever you’ve learned in the classroom is useless, and the real learning happens on the job. An example off the top of my head, is sales. You can learn all the techniques you want, but they pale in comparison to what you learn when you actually sell things to people. And this is the norm for a lot of careers, not the exception. Most of what people learn in class ends up useless.
So in conclusion, while learning facts and theoretical knowledge might be required in some jobs, for most people, the stuff they learned in university will be largely useless.
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Education has always been a contentious point of discussion around the table since always. There have been umpteen concerns and issues that have been persistent over the years that generally have people to side with different extremes. One among them is the topic of whether the educational institutions foster cramming the facts or they should rather focus on learning applicable and practical skills. I agree with the latter notion and shall be talking about the same in the subsequent paragraphs.
Our education system has always had anomalies and shortcomings when the point of application of the facts and knowledge imparted in the institutions arises. Many a time it has been that there is a concept of rote learning in these educational hubs and students are hardly left with any logical understanding that categorically helps them in picturizing it to the concrete reality. Similarly, they are made to cram and jam the pages of their textbooks that they are hardly able to take away any plausible or heuristic applicability of it. Moreover, the onboarding of the new recruits is majorly on the basis of the degrees they have, whether or not the person is having sound knowledge of the concerned domain. That shows the whole framework of stressing more on the factual nuances in our educational system.
In fact, if surveys are to go by, industries have to spend a large amount of time and squander a sum of money to train the so-called untrained-trained college freshers. Such malpractices and erroneous learning concepts waste the time not only of the students but also of the society they are the citizens of. Mugging up the factual contents renders students bland and drab with a superficial knowledge that hardly finds any usability in the real-time industrial exposure. This is dismaying and also utterly displeasing to the growth and development of the students. The golden period of a child’s educational years could have rather been used for something productive if such jinxed and passe learning patterns were displaced.
Though in some professions like medicine and scientific researches, facts are important to know, however, even in these domains of study, a paucity of practical acumen shall corrode a whole learning demeanour of the students enrolled for such courses.
Conclusively, it could thus be stated that it’s high time that the relevant authorities wake up to the diminutive graph of the ailing educational trends and start working and planning to buttress it effectively.
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2 Comments
Malka Beenish
Posted on Nov 19, 2021
There is no doubt that practical exposure is as important as theoretical knowledge. A number of people think that much time is devoted to teaching the facts instead of focusing on hands-on experience in all phases of learning, whether it is school or college. I completely agree with the statement and in this essay, I will support my view with valid arguments and examples.
Most of the institutes follow the conventional method of teaching which includes reading, learning, and writing. By this method, children can only recall concepts for a limited amount of time, and when it is time to apply that knowledge at work they have forgotten it. Consequently, many students who have degrees in physics or electronics cannot even change bulbs. Likewise, many MBAs cannot fill out a tax form. All of this points to the shortcomings of a system of learning that focuses only on theory.
Another example of this is that the current curriculum does not have an equal number of theory and practical classes. To illustrate, while I had one lecture each day on the theoretical aspects of computers), there was only 1 laboratory session in the whole week. Due to this improper division, I could not practice everything being taught and hence lacked a proper understanding of the concepts. If we had an equal proportion of theory and practical classes, I would have gained better skills and confidence. A recent study by the educational department of New Delhi has shown that youngsters who were shown experiments were able to memorize and retain the information for a longer period of time than the ones who read it.
To conclude, I agree with the argument that much time is being spent on cramming instead of experimental learning because of the current structure of teaching. Unfortunately, this overemphasis on theory prevents/stops students from acquiring real-world skills.
Reply
Janice Thompson
Posted on Nov 20, 2021
Band score: 5.5
Since this is an opinion essay, it is required to present just one line of contrast after the
two opinionated paragraphs.
Concentrate on tenses and use “c2” vocabulary.