1 . My 21-year-old niece, a second-year undergraduate, mentioned that she watches video lectures offline at twice the normal speed. Struck by this, I asked some other students I know. Many now routinely speed up their lectures when learning offline — often by 1.5 times, sometimes by even more. Speed learning is not for everyone, but there are websites where students discuss how odd it will be once they return to the lecture theatre. One contributor wrote: “Normal speed now sounds like drunk speed.”

Education was adapting to the digital world long before Covid-19 but, as with so many other human activities, the pandemic has given learning a huge push towards the virtual. Overnight, schools and universities closed and teachers and students had to find ways to do what they do only via the internet. “This is a time for schools and systems to reimagine education without schooling or classrooms,” says Professor Yong Zhao. Dr Jim Watterston in Australia thinks that, while the traditional classroom is still alive and well, education needs to be more adventurous and flexible. Earlier this year, Zhao and Watterston co-authored a paper in which they identified some major changes that should happen in education post-lockdown.

The first concerns the content, which should emphasize such things as creativity, critical thinking and leadership, rather than the collection and storage of information. “For humans to progress in the age of smart machines, it is essential that they do not compete with machines.”, they wrote, “Instead, they need to be more human.”

The second is that students should have more control over their learning, with the teacher’s role shifting from instructor to supervisor of learning resources, advisor and motivator. This is where so-called “active learning” comes in with a growing body of research suggesting that comprehension and memory are better when students learn in a hands-on way — through discussion and interactive technologies, for example. It’s also where the concept of “productive failure” applies. Professor Manu Kapurin argues that students learn better from their own or others’ failed attempts to solve a problem before or even instead of being told how to solve it.

If the progress of the times is unable to hold back the coming revolution in education, it seems unlikely that the traditional classroom is going to have any luck in its attempts trying to turn back the clock. As Laurillard puts it, “It took a global pandemic to drive home what we’ve been saying for 20 years.”

A Montessori Education

There are now at least 60,000 schools across the world using the Montessori method. There are different kinds of Montessori schools, but certain fundamental principles have remained the same.

One is the idea of teachers encouraging the children to complete the activities with as little adult involvement as possible. Take the Ecoscuola Montessori on the Italian island of Sicily. At the school, there is a subject called “Practical Life”. It involves real-life practical tasks, such as serving drinks to their classmates. For safety, teachers would take charge of boiling the water, but the children would play active roles in cleaning the work surface and then presenting the drinks to others. “During breakfast and lunch, they are also self-directed, taking it in turns to lay the table and serve their classmates,” says Miriam Ferro, the headteacher of Ecoscuola.

The method encourages not only independence, but also cooperation. Children of different ages are taught in the same classroom, so that the six-year-olds, for example, can help the three-year-olds. In addition, each session is three hours long so as to allow the children to bury themselves in what they are doing. The learning materials are also designed for being handled and explored with all the senses. For example, letters and numbers are made of sandpaper, which the child can trace with their finger.

This concept may sound sensible. But does it bring about any tangible (实际的) benefits, beyond those seen in a typical classroom?

Angeline Lillard, a professor of psychology, found some benefits for children’s development while looking at a Montessori school in Milwaukee, in the United States. Analyzing their progress at age five, she found that the children tended to have better literacy, numeracy, executive function and social skills, compared to those who had attended the other schools. And at age 12, they showed better story-telling abilities.

3 . A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the 22^nd century. What should we teach that baby to help them survive and flourish in the world of 2050 and beyond? What kind of skills will they need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them, and navigate their tough life?

At present, too many schools across the world focus on providing pupils with a set of predetermined skills, such as writing computer code in C++ and conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort in teaching kids how to write in C++ or to speak Chinese, only to discover sooner or later that AI will have been able to code software far better than humans, and that a new translation app will have enabled you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even though you only know how to say ni hao.

So what should we be teaching? Many experts argue that schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills: the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

To succeed in such a demanding task, you will need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better—to know what you are and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. This advice was never more urgent than in the mid-21^st century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon and Facebook are all racing to hack you.

Right now, the algorithms (算法) are watching where you go, what you buy, and who you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, breaths and heartbeats. They are relying on big data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate (操纵) you. In the end, authority will shift to them.

Of course, you might be perfectly happy giving up all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to make decisions for you and for the rest of the world. If, however, you want to maintain some control over your personal existence and over the future of life in general, you have to run faster than the algorithms. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions (幻想) behind. They are very heavy.

6 . One of the joys of growing up in the leafy suburbs of London was the freedom of living inside a wood. The street where my parents’ house sits runs through one comer of Epping Forest, a carefully manicured (修剪的) greenbelt to retain a sense of unspoilt wilderness. As a result, my brother and I were immediately able to go out of our back gate to climb trees, build dens in the bushes and swing on ropes hung from boughs.

My three boys also have a place, called Glamis Adventure Playground, where they can easily escape their parents, swing on ropes, and even pitch tents for an overnight camp, despite growing up in one of the UK’s most deprived and densely populated boroughs. It’s an oasis of fun for young people constructed on a wasteland with the aim of enabling children to create their own fun.

The tragedy, however, is that they may be the last generation of inner-city kids to experience such freedom. Adventure playgrounds such as Glamis are now an endangered species, according to recent research by Play England, which found that 15 per cent of the 147 sites in operation just five years ago are now shut. Many of the playgrounds, run by local authorities, would end up getting killed off by funding cuts begun in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

But even those that still survive today remain at risk due to health and safety concerns and a downplaying by government of play as an essential part of the developmental process, according to Play England chair of trustees Anita Grant.

“Adventure playgrounds are built on trust, autonomy and freedom by children making their own games without the adults telling them what to do,” Grant says. “But there is a new way of discussing play where people talk about learning through play. As soon as you start viewing play like this, as something that needs outcomes, it stops being play for children.”

Another threat to adventure playgrounds is more pernicious than funding cuts: a fear about letting children out on their own to play. Research conducted in 2020 for the British Children’s Play Survey found the average age children were allowed out on their own was 11, two years later than their parents’ generation.

“The professionalization of parenting” — the idea that there is a recipe for children becoming well-rounded adults that has encouraged mums and dads to micromanage their offspring — is to blame. “Taking risks is a really important part of a child’s development but that often conflicts with what people feel is their responsibility as parents,” Dodd says. “Freedom of play is undervalued because we want our children to get a new skill that we can put on social media and brag about.” Typically, children must now play in a way that is being defined by adults.

9 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

Multicultural Education

The changing populations of students in American schools has brought come changes in what is taught in the schools as well.

One in three students in U.S. schools is a member of a racial or ethnic minority group, and one in five lives with a parent who was born outside the United States. Ethnic and racial minorities have criticized schools and textbooks for focusing too much on the literature and historical events of Anglo-Europeans or white males. They believe that schools have almost ignored the contributions of African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans. Some have charged that American history has been told from the perspective of Anglo-Europeans, rather than exploring historical events from the various perspectives of those involved.

For example, the frontier movement west has been presented more from the perspective of descendants of white settlers than from the perspectives of the descendants oi the Native Americans who were moved in the process.

During the 1990s. schools began to seriously examine their curricula and to try to incorporate more varied cultural information and perspectives into education. These attempts to provide multicultural education have ranged from simply adding information and literature to the current textbooks and curricula, to more sweeping attempts to transform the basic curriculum into one which is more reflective of the diversity of the students who will study it.

At the most basic level, many schools celebrate African-American History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month, or they have international festivals which include dancing, singing, and foods from the native countries of their students. At a deeper level, many schools have adopted history or social studies textbooks which include more information about African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other minorities, or American literature texts that include poetry and fiction written by Americans of all ethnic backgrounds.

In some colleges, the traditional set of Western great books, sometimes called “the canon,” has been replaced by a much broader set of literary texts, reflecting the experiences and backgrounds of the students who will be reading them.

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