GMAT WRITTING

140. Some experts maintain that students learn best in a highly structured environment, one that emphasizes discipline, punctuality, and routine. Others insist that educators, if they are to help students maximize their potential, ought to maintain an atmosphere of relative freedom and spontaneity.

Explain your position on the issue of structure versus freedom in an ideal learning environment. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

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OUTLINE

1.A free atmosphere initiates creativity.
2.A free atmosphere inspires the potentialities.
3.However, anyone can not success without any decipline.

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The issue of which is the best environment for students to study is a complex one, since it involves a conflict between our humanity and the progress of learning. In my perspective, compared to a structured environment, an relatively free atmosphere benifits more.

 

One key facor is that a free atmosphere initiates creativity. There are many important qualities of a person who achieve success, such as hardwork, organized thinking, etc. However, the greatest achievement or breakthough in a field always is conduced by creative thinking. The creativity ,so called inspiration, appears only in a relative relaxed environment. There are lots of examples in the field of art. An artist likes to travel around and spend a lot of time as he/she wishes. Even some artists would do this as a routine method to overcome the lack of inspiration when their mind were staffed at one place.

 

The other key factor involves another function of free atmospere---to inspire one’s potentiality. That is to say, although routine trainning could develop one’s ability which has already emerged above the sea, one’s potential ability can hardly be induced by routine trainning or strict discipline. The shown ability could only deal with existing issues, but the potentiality could resolve unknown problems which is more than existed. There is livid instance in education. Janpanese teach their children with strict discipline and heavey assignment. So, Janpanese could make one existing thing to its best with their highly skills. But, at the same time, most Janpanese lose their possible ablilities to explore many unkonwn fields. To the contrast, Americans emphasize relative free environment to a young man in order to dig one’s potentiality out. So, it is not unbelievable that America could achieve the top in many fields, no matter ecomomy, politics, science and other fields.

 

Nevertheless, when a person needs to aquire a specific skill, he/she must follow strict discipline. Because both common sense and cognitive science have shown us that the best method to aquire a skill is to practice repeatedly in a intense duration.

 

In sum, an ideal learning environment should mainly contain a free air for students to encourage them develop creativity and potentiality. And meanwhile, it is impossible to ignore the impotance of routine and strict discipline to students, especially in high skill fields.