GRE作文范文：学科

　　题目：

　　Instead of requiring students to take courses in a variety of disciplines―that is, courses ranging from the arts and the humanities to the physical and biological sciences―colleges and universities should allow students to enroll only in those courses that will help prepare them for jobs in their chosen fields. Such concentration is necessary in todays increasingly work-oriented society.

　　与其要求学生们选修各种各样的学科――从艺术和人文科学到物理和生物科学――大学还不如允许学生们仅仅去选择那些有助于他们今后工作的学科。这种集中在当今这个工作至上的社会是必要的。

　　正文：

　　The above argument completely neglects the internal value and essence of college education. If it were put into effect, not only the education itself but also the whole society would undergo a severe devastation. Even for the sake of practicality, also it is not necessarily a good suggestion and will seriously mislead students in their future.

　　When it is concerned with the purpose and essence of education, at the beginning one must refer to the father of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, whose influence upon the American and world education has reached far into even today. One of his most famous apothegms about education is that the truly valuable education should be aiming at the improvement of both ones moralities and faculties. Varying greatly though peoples understanding over this idea is over times, seldom did they suspect its justification and insightfulness. Therefore, it is safe to base our analysis upon this thought in order to determine whether students should be allow to enroll only in those work-oriented courses.

　　There is almost no escaping the fact that the purely vocation-oriented education is quite inconsistent with developing a lofty or decent moral in students. In traditional society, it was family and community that transmitted its basic values, conventions and moralities to children. As time goes by, however, this role and responsibility have been gradually shifted to schools and teachers, either for better or worse. If the whole education becomes completely vocation-oriented, the education of moralities is certain to become secondary for both schools and students, and the neglecting of moral education will become something sooner or later. That is to say, modern education system will fail to undertake the responsibilities that traditional family and community transmitted to it. To some extent, this is just what happens in many schools of many counties. As a result, when we continuously complain the decline in moralities, no one realizes that it intrinsically origins from the absence of roles to undertake the duty for moral education.

　　Also a work-oriented education contradicts fundamentally with the aim of improving faculties. Vocational education differs from academic education in that it lays more emphasis on the teaching of methods, techniques and specific knowledge, while the latter values more the nurturing of a profound, well-rounded intelligence and character. In a word, vocational education simply stuffs students with all kinds of practical content, which has little to do with improving faculties. By this education, maybe we will produce a larger number of qualified engineers or specialists, but really great thinkers like Newton, Einstein or Karl Marx would never come up. Obviously, such a vocational education aims at temporary mean benefits, far more than the long-term and actually valuable ones of human beings.

　　Furthermore, even when practical goals are involved, the work-oriented courses also are not necessary good choices for student. The rapid growth of modern science and technology makes professions ceaselessly changeable, new ones continuously emerging and old ones continuously disappearing. On this occasion, it is high likely that the hot courses for jobs today will become completely obsolete, unwelcome by market. Taking merely vocation-oriented courses, thus, means a higher risk for students. However, this kind of risk can be greatly avoided by non-work-oriented education, that is, academic education through which we can learn some life skills―skills including logic thinking, reasoning, synthesizing, and creative problem-solving. Undoubtedly, these personal faculties will never be out of date and can ensure a brilliant future for students who are excellent in these aspects.

　　In conclusion, there is always something that is perpetual in the nature of education, and it never changes with the change of peoples focus, interest or preference. The pursuit of education for moralities and faculties is certainly just such an epitome.Perhaps that is what we can learn from Thomas Jefferson and the above discussion.