Once English "gets out" of the main subject, the children of ordinary families will really lose at the starting line.

On the afternoon of September 4, a person who dealt with the "mean value theorem" all the year round pushed English to the top of the hot search.

Tang Jiafeng, a doctor of mathematics from Nanjing university and a famous teacher of mathematics for postgraduate entrance examination, sent several articles in succession on his headline account, moving the topic from integral derivative to English.

The sentence he wrote was later forwarded countless times by screenshots:

“Today, I publicly call for the removal of English from its status as a core subject!” From elementary school through junior high, Senior high school, and university, our children, parents, and schools have devoted countless resources and much time to courses that most people will never need after they enter the workforce."

Image source: Weibo

In less than 24 hours, the topic reached the top of the microblog hot search list.

Parents, teachers and alumni are all discussing the same thing overnight:Is it a huge waste to learn English for more than ten years?

The starting point of this matter has nothing to do with English.

Tang Jiafeng's starting point stems from the adjustment of the historical scoring rules for the senior high school entrance examination in some areas: worried that history will be weakened, so he suggested that if the burden must be reduced, it is English that should be reduced.

One stone stirs up a thousand waves.

The parents who support it directly call out the hearts of the people: don't write English without distinction among the whole people, and return the time to history, Chinese and sports.

The voices of opposition are also raging: once English quits the main subject, public schools are put into contraction, ordinary families lose their fair upward path, English will completely become the exclusive privilege of rich families, and ordinary people will never have the opportunity to open the door to the world by English.

Former Editor-in-Chief of Global TimesHu XijinHe immediately issued a rebuttal, denouncing those who denounced learning English as "worshiping foreign things and fawning on foreign countries" and advocating their expulsion from the main subject as "extreme and narrow-minded".

He said bluntly that once English is reduced to a minor subject, rich families can still spend money on tutoring, and children from ordinary families will lose at the starting line.Adhering to the main subject of English is to maintain educational equity.

The two sides were arguing at each other's will.

The Ministry of Education has already responded:The status of English in the college entrance examination will not change in the short term, but the proportion of class hours has been changed from11%-13% down to 6%-8% 。

When AI translation is more and more accurate, when"english is useless"With a comeback, how should we look at English? Is it worth learning English?

Tang Jiafeng's stamp is not English itself.

It's a deformed exam-oriented volume.

The reason why Tang Jiafeng's views resonate so much is not that the public really hates the language of English, but that they are disgusted with reality.An Infinite Enlarged English Test Paper。

In reality, the curriculum standard stipulates that English class hours in primary and secondary schools only account for 6%-8% of the total class hours, but many families and extracurricular training institutions have increased the weight of English indefinitely.

Kindergarten began to brush words, primary school bubble cram school, more than ten years of massive brush topic back template.

But the reality is cruel:Many children have finished the high school entrance examination and CET-4 and CET-6. After leaving the campus, they will almost never take the initiative to use English again.

But we have to distinguish two things:Disgusting "brushing questions for exams" does not mean denying English learning itself.

Image source: unsplash.com

Tang Jiafeng's statement that "the vast majority of artificial functions cannot speak English" is a fact, but it is only a partial fact.

According to the 51job survey, English is used significantly more frequently in high-paying jobs, and more than 70% of workers earning more than 10,000 yuan a month will be exposed to English content.

AI can do shallow translation, but it cannot solve the real scenes of obtaining first-hand cutting-edge information, cross-cultural communication, academic speculation and foreign cooperation.

What is more alarming is that if English is simply downgraded to an elective examination, the biggest victim is precisely the ordinary family.

Wealthy families can still invite foreign teachers and take international courses to maintain their children's foreign language ability. Children from ordinary families will lose the opportunity to learn systematically in schools, and the barriers of classes will be further thickened.

The reform direction of the Ministry of Education is actually very clear:English should not be canceled, but English should be returned from "brushing machine" to the standard of "language tool and thinking carrier".。

Reduce rote learning, strengthen listening and speaking, thinking, cross-cultural understanding.

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In the past, when writing programs, human beings had to learn C and Java and translate their ideas into code that machines could understand.

Today, the Big Model era has revolutionized logic: you just have to tell AI, in natural language, what you want to achieve.

Programming becomes the ability to describe ideas, define goals, disassemble requirements, and iterate on solutions.

AI are responsible for the task of "how to do", while humans are responsible for defining "what to do", "what is good" and "what is right".

President of Anthropic Big Model CompanyDaniela AmodeiThe undergraduate course is English literature. The core person in charge of the domestic Tongyi Thousand QuestionsLin JunyangBachelor's degree in English, master's degree in linguistics.

They do not win by writing code, but stand at the core of the AI industry by the logic disassembly, text understanding and value judgment ability brought by language.

AI translation can convert words, but it cannot do these things:

First-hand access to cutting-edge information:The first version of the world's top scientific research papers, industry reports and cutting-edge technical materials is in English. Relying on translation will always be one step slower, and details will be lost and translation deviations will arise....

cross cultural empathy and communication:Business negotiations, academic debates, and ideological collisions can be translated literally, but the context, subtext, cultural humor, and trust between people cannot be repeated by machines.

Critical thinking skills:Read the original text, distinguish facts, opinions, logical loopholes, and weigh the pros and cons from multiple angles. This is the bottom thinking brought by language training. AI can't think for you.

AI is an efficiency tool that can help us complete translation and rewriting,It is still human ability to ask high-quality questions, accurately describe needs, identify the authenticity of information, and think from multiple perspectives.。

The ultimate goal of learning English is not to "get high marks on exams", but to have a set of thinking tools leading to the world.

It is not English that really destroys children.

is the wrong learning goal

Behind this controversy, the real headache is not English itself, but the "brush questions and take exams" model.

This judgment is officially endorsed.

In its reply, the Ministry of Education clearly pointed out: "there is a tendency of examination-oriented teaching in China's basic education, which is directly due to the admission of students in the high school entrance examination according to the total score of examination subjects. In English teaching, many schools carry out English teaching around entrance examinations. Test-oriented English causes many students to spend a long time learning English, but still'Deaf English'with'dumb english'。"

An earlier reflection came from 2013.

Former spokesperson for the Ministry of EducationWang XumingThe call for the "abolition of English classes in primary schools" has sparked a discussion that is at heart:"Saying well is not as good as taking exams." The importance of words and grammar has become increasingly prominent, and the literacy of "listening" and "speaking" has been seriously ignored.

People who have passed CET-4 and CET-6 but cannot communicate can be found everywhere.

People's Daily wrote a sentence at that time, which is still sharp today:"English was originally a practical language tool, but under the examination-oriented education system, English has gradually changed into a knowledge-based basic subject and examination subject."

That's the really valuable part of Tang Jiafeng's anger,What he poked was not "should English be learned", but "we spent too much time learning the wrong way".

Qu Zhenyuan, president of the Chinese Higher Education Association, once used "one past and four deviations" to summarize this problem: humanistic education is too weak, while foreign language teaching is "low level". The result is"Internal surplus, external deficit"。

Domestic daily life does not need so much, but it cannot open its mouth to the outside world.

So what really should be reformed is not the status of the subject, but the way it is evaluated.

In fact, the direction is already clear: weaken the difficult grammar, strengthen the practical listening and speaking, and shift from "whether it can be used" to "whether it can be used"; Weakening the unity and stumble, turning to hierarchical teaching and personalized selection.

The fundamental way out liesPromote the reform of the enrollment system, give colleges and universities greater autonomy, and independently put forward foreign language performance requirements based on the talent training goals of different disciplines and majors。

Let medical students, engineers, artists, each pay a reasonable price for English.

The ultimate goal of reducing the burden is not to lower the standard, but to eliminate invalid internal papers and return to the law of education.

return to the parents of the most essential torture:

We let children learn English, what is the figure?

Combing the whole debate, we will find that the contradiction is never in "whether English should be learned", but in "what kind of English should we learn".

• It is not for everyone to speak English every day after graduation;

• Not in order to brush out a beautiful test score, used to enter a higher school in the paper;

• It is a window, so that children can directly read the world's cutting-edge knowledge, see different cultures, with multiple perspectives;

• It is also a set of thinking training: learn to distinguish facts and opinions, look at problems from multiple angles, express them with reason and evidence, respect different positions, and have the ability of critical thinking.

Machine translation can solve the surface text conversion, but speculation, empathy, cross-cultural understanding, high-quality questions, these belong to the human core, can never be taken over by AI.

Tang Jiafeng is worried about the invalid internal volume of the whole people regardless of cost.

The reality tells us that canceling subjects across the line will only create greater educational injustice.

The reform direction given by the Ministry of Education is exactly the middle way:Retain the subject status, but peel off the excessive test-taking shackles and return to the essence of language tools and thinking training.

AI can translate thousands of words, but not a person's thinking.

In the future, it is not the people who can't speak English, but the people who can only memorize and brush the questions, but can't think independently.

Parents should think more about whether to quit the main subject than struggling with English:We learn English, whether it is for a test paper, or to open a window to the world for children.