Education and Its Impact on A Country
The biggest influence on a country is its education system
The first thing comes to people’s mind when they heard about education is the school days. The time when people spent most of their time at school listening to some teaching. Some even reminded of the examination period which they never wanted to re-experience anymore. Indeed, education is something related to what people experienced in school but it is not just some teaching or examination. According to Wikipedia, education is ‘the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. Its methods include storytelling, discussion, teaching, training, and direct research.’. In other words, education is anything that regarded as the act of providing any knowledge, be it support of place, time, methods, materials, curriculum, or teaching personnel. So, school, teacher, and exam are just a part of education.
“Education plays an important role in a nation”, “for a nation to prosper education is highly needed”, “the development of a nation lies in the progress of education”. Those are things that we usually hear, but what is the relation between education and a nation? Before moving to that topic, we need to know the use of education and what and how education benefits us.
As we know before, knowledge is highly related to education. It is the most beneficial thing that education can offer us. Knowledge can improve our quality, transforming us from a state of not knowing to the state of knowing something. Knowledge allows us to find the reason of how the things we see work. It widens our view clearly on everything around us not just as we see as it is but based on reasoning. It leads us to a more experienced life and making us think more mature.
Other than knowledge, moral teaching and skill polishing are other things that education offer. The thing is, education preserves the balance between the three things. Without a good attitude and practice, knowledge is just like a well-made tool that is not maintained nor put to good use. Ethics of becoming a well-behaved citizen as well as ethic in using knowledge for good mean are emphasized in education as to how knowledge is.
Education is primarily taught at schools however education scope extends beyond the school environment and it is wider than you had ever thought of. Especially nowadays when internet access is present. The internet is the biggest source of education, there you can access more than millions of information, knowledge. The Internet also offers a lot of choice in accessing the information, you can either register for an online tutor, join a community, read articles, and you can even visualize it slowly, step by step through tutorial videos. With it, you can easily find what you want to get on the internet easily by typing a few keywords which doesn’t take much time, you can search it anytime and anywhere as long there is an internet connection, and you can also store it for offline accessing. The simple usage of the internet for teaching online and distributing learning materials have been put into practice by schools in the advanced country for years.
Therefore, education is really important when it comes to improving the quality of human resources in a country especially youth, the fundamental part for a country to develop and survive. Having a good quality of human resources allows the country to efficiently develop its natural resources and improve the aspect of the country economically, environmentally, politically, and socially. Take Singapore as an example, the country without any natural resource, she even imports daily consumption water from her neighbors. However, she has a remarkable human resource and that is what makes Singapore the most prosperous country in Southeast Asia. The key lies in its good education system and the people-government support education for the youth. Singapore spends 3.9% of its GDP on education and Singaporean government subsidies more than 90% of the education. The education, civilizing the people of Singapore since the independence of Singapore up until now, building up the characteristic and improving the ability of each individual in managing the country. Intelligence, plan, management, discipline, commitment, and hard work are some of the characters that adhere to the people of Singapore.
The exemplar of Singapore is proof to us that education takes a part in country civilizing. That is why countries and people should take more notice in education. There are several ways to achieve it, however, it first needs the support from both the government and the people. Then the develop the curriculum, the standard of how education should be implemented and carried out.
Next, some complement needed to be fulfilled to complete the education system. The most important, which is the individual who transfers the knowledge to the learners, teachers. They are the most influential beings that can change young learners. They can be the one who inspires the student, who helps them in finding their talent and interest, and the one who guides them to their future. The shape of an individual determined by the quality of the teacher and the methods used by the teacher in guiding them. Japan, the country which is defeated in WWII, can get out of adversity without involving further generations is because of the existence of the teacher. After the surrender of the Japanese, the first question asked by the Emperor of Japan was “How many teachers left that we have?”. Following that, Japan, being the only country to transfer all of her expenditure on the military into rebuilding the country, not to forget education.
Other than teacher, there are also supportive means which are required such as the place where the teaching process will be carried out, the equipment which is needed in the studying process, and the source of information, books, and Internets.
Last but not least, the participation of the learners which is not based on being forced but a pure urge and interest in gaining an education is highly required. Because when someone is forced in doing something that it has no interest in, it will not be able to carry out the task to full potential nor be put to practice. The same case happens for learners, they won’t be able to understand fully or catch up to what is taught. Only through interest, curiosity and creativity will be born, striving will be made to achieve the goal, and life will be meaningful.
To conclude, education is indeed very important in developing human resources as well as the country. We can learn from advanced countries in which had realized the importance of education and developed their human resources. Other countries, should follow the steps by putting efforts into improving the quality of education, creating a more civilized country.
