【推荐1】While many of our friends are on holiday in foreign places this summer, our family will be staying at home to get away from it all, as we have done for the last five years. We generally just wander about at home and catch up with some reading. The kids are old enough to go off on their own and often go to the local park or open-air pool. When we have visitors, we might go on the day trip somewhere. On the whole, though, we don’t bother going much beyond our local area. It’s a pattern we’re going to stick to for the foreseeable future for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, it’s just much more relaxing. You don’t have any of the inconveniences and annoyances which are so often associated with travelling. And that’s not to mention the kids asking ‘Are we there yet?’ every two minutes or ‘Do we HAVE to go to the museum?’ Honestly, there’s nothing like dragging a couple of teenagers round some Roman remains to put you off that kind of thing for life. All these would inevitably wind me up, which in turn would lead to a quarrel where I would complain about how ungrateful they were, and how anyone else would leap at the chance to see the places we were taking them, and then I’d threaten them that next time we’d just stay at home! Well, finally I carried out the threat—and everyone’s far, far happier!

If the truth be told, I can’t say I ever really enjoyed going sightseeing anyway. I think we were going on holiday simply out of habit and going sightseeing out of some weird sense of duty. I felt it was what you ought to do when you go abroad and that it would be education for the kids. Most of the time, though, these places actually just left me cold. Even the really big monuments, which are genuinely impressive, didn’t move me in the way I expected. Take the Pyramids. I’d always wanted to go and see them. I’d imagined myself traveling through the desert on a camel to reach them, the sun beating down on my back. The reality, when I finally went there, was that I only had to walk through the streets of Cairo in a taxi to reach them. While they are hugely impressive achievements of engineering, you have to battle with crowds of tourists to get anywhere near them, fighting off the crowds of locals as they shout for business, persuading you to change money or to take a camel ride. I don’t blame these people—they’re just trying to earn a living—but frankly, I could’ve done without it and, for me at least, it meant the Pyramids didn’t live up to my expectations.

【推荐1】Do kids really need to go to school to learn? For most people it is obvious that school is the right place where real learning takes place, and for them real learning takes place.

The social theorist Ivan Illich believes the idea that learning is the result of teaching is ridiculous. Most learning happens without the person being taught consciously. We learn to speak, to think, to walk and to do many things without teachers. People who learn a second language well are much more likely to develop better because of interests outside the classroom-interests in movies, music, magazines, foreign friends, games or computers which give these people the motivation that keeps them learning

Ivan Illich also says, “an academic education favors only the minority of students who want to go to university. As for the majority, their needs and interests and talents are not provided by an educational system.”

On the other hand, most people agree that school teaches everyone a valuable lesson. It teaches kids that life must be organized. It helps students to develop good habits, to behave in public, to follow certain rules, which is important for a comfortable life for everyone. School also helps them to make friends, work in a team and learn to help others to build up social relations, so that they will acquire the habits and attitudes needed by the future public life.

In addition, there are exams during the pupils’ study, and the real importance of exams is not only to check your subject but also to encourage you to make progress step by step. If you get a good grade, it means you can go to a better school. So every successful exam opens more doors in life for the students. If you fail in exams, school offers the pupils an instruction in their failure to make them stronger, which is beneficial to their future life.

Undoubtedly schools are necessity in our modern and highly organized society. It is a nice idea that education takes place in groups, which is provided by professional teachers. But educational system needs to be up-to-date so that the experience of school is much more positive for all students.