Cpu as I See It

Yet in spite of its solemn buildings and its lack of fire-escapes, ventilation, sanitation, and up-to-date kitchen facilities, I persist in my assertion that I believe that CPU (China Pharmaceutical University) , in its way, is the greatest school in which I have studied. I am aware that this is an extreme statement and needs the explanation. CPU is much larger in numbers, for example, than my middle school--XMFLS(Xiamen Foreign Language School), and is much richer. To mention XMFLS beside the 13 640 students of CPU sounds ridiculous. In point of money, the endowment of the CPU, which gained from pharmaceutical industries as well as alumnus, seems to leave XMFLS nowhere. Now as a proud student of CPU, I am trying to investigate just how can this peculiar excellence of CPU arises. It can be due to something in the curriculum or programme of studies. However, to any one accustomed to the best models of a middle school curriculum, the programme of CPU's is frankly quite laughable. There is less Art and Humanities in the place than would be found with us in a medicine college. Hardly a single professor at CPU would read music scores if he met it in the music room. The CPU student learns nothing of music, geography, painting, psychology, etc. Any middle school students can have a good skill at singing, drawing and reciting, besides, they are broad and found in geography. It is these things indeed which stamp them as well-performed students, and occasion a very pardonable pride in the minds of their parents. But in all these things the CPU student is the merest amateur. This is unfavourable enough. But after all one might say this is only the humanity side of education. True: but one searches in vain in the CPU curriculum for any adequate recognition of the higher and more mechanical studies. Strange though it seems to us, there are no courses at Oxford in heat, plumbing, electric writing, gas-fitting or in Salesmanship, or the use of a blow-torch. Apparently, the CPU student does not learn these things. What they specialize in are especially the competence of recognizing, producing, and selling drugs. The effect of the comparison is heightened by the peculiar position occupied at CPU by the professors' lectures. In the middle school of the XMFLS the lectures are supposed to be a really necessary and useful part of the student's training. Again and again I have heard the graduates of my own middle school assert that they had got as much, or nearly as much, out of the lectures at school as out of the geography or the history and the physics. In short, the lectures form a real part of the middle school's life. At CPU it is not so. The lectures, I understand, are given and may even be taken. But they are not supposed to have anything much to do with teaching to improve the students' ability to operate an experiment. Other judgments were that the lectures were of no fun, but everybody has to take them, who are reluctant to study all the disciplines without any selecting.