Philip Qin: Dear folks, first best wishes to everyone for the new year, sincere thanks to the club and event organizers for the great efforts, then to share my little bit of thought on human education and self development, can’t write too much here, but am willing to share more in the discussion after the film on this Saturday.

 Ever since human started building civilization, knowledge needs to be passed along to the next generations, this is called education, mostly to the youngsters. Self development is a different but broader concept, it applies to all ages. There have been big and long lasting confusion about education and self development, especially in the ways to carry out them correctly, for thousands of years in almost all nations and countries, till now.

There are 3 levels for human education and self development: knowledge, understanding, and intelligence.

1.       Knowledge is to know how things are and what happen.

2.       Understanding is to know why things exist and happen in the ways they do, with the help of knowledge learned;

3.       Intelligence is to reason and analyze the internal and in-depth links between things to figure out the patterns or rules to predict future more accurately, with the help of the knowledge and understanding acquired and accumulated.

So you see these 3 are different, the right ways to achieve them are also quite different.

 Learning knowledge is the basic layer usually takes most of the time of education. There is a very big misconception about this layer, the most common concept is to make the students learn and remember more or all knowledge in the teaching materials, then test their memory of such knowledge as a main part of the exams. But people overlooked one fact is that based on the structure of human brain, memory do fade away over time, this is why adults forget about many detailed knowledge learned in the schools after years, thus setting the goal for the students to memorize all the knowledge does not make good sense since they will forget a lot later anyway. Expecting and requiring students to memorize all knowledge sets tremendous unnecessary load and pressure on them, causes most of the problems in educations, like the one in this film.

 Ideally understanding the knowledge should be set as the primary goal of education, but the fact is the weight on this is too light. Intelligence is more difficult to teach, especially when the teachers and parents don’t really understand how it is formed and developed.

 Knowledge can be looked up easily when needed with materials so well prepared and accessible now, more weight should be put on the understanding and intelligence build up. But sadly the fact is opposite. More knowledge should be presented to the students, but shouldn’t be required to be memorized, with enough interest and exposure, key knowledge will be remembered naturally with no pain and pressure. Promoting understanding and intelligence needs some new and better ways after knowing more about how human brain develops and works, with tremendous improvements due.

 With in-depth and thorough understanding about the whole spectrum of knowledge, understanding and intelligence build up, a break-through and revolution can be achieved to realize much more or most of human potential, lift to tens or even hundreds of times higher in natural and no pain ways, as I believe, to happen. Thanks.