the best way to teach is to praise positive actions and ignore negative ones.

The speaker asserts that to praise positive actions and ignore negative ones is the best way for education, which I partly agree with. For the first prong of this dual issue about praising positive actions, it is undeniable an effective way for good education in both personal and school perspective. However, I take exception with the second prong about ignorance of negative actions,

From a personal view, praise is invariably effective means for guiding people to behave in certain ways that a school, a firm, or the society advocates from the primary education to the working stage, which means that it is a panacea for all kinds of education. When praised by a teacher, or a leader, the person knows that his her behavior is right ones, and accordingly develop the ability of distinguishing the right from the wrong. Besides, praise could promote a better behavior. I own its function for the active psychological process that it could bring about. Everyone is born to be fond of appraise in that it is a kind of recognition for people and satisfy people’s vanity, which stems from people’s self-cognition in a certain group. This positive psychological process would entice people’s desire to get more praise to show his or her outstanding capability and higher status, thereby in turn, encourage him or herself to behave in this way more intensively. That is the reason that every education system has its own praise programs in terms of mental awards and material awards.

From the view of school or the society, praise may promote the whole group to behave better. Praise for someone would stimulate other persons to behave in the same way due to human’s aggressive instinct. And gradually, the whole group would form a positive environment of behaving in this way which gradually influence every member, since no one want to be regarded as special due to the human nature of identification with a certain group. By the same taken, the whole society would produce an positive culture that advance the nation’s development.

However, as to ignoring negative behaviors, I don’t believe it is proper to advance education. For one thing, mere ignoring could never cope with the problem deep into itself, since the students could never know the thing he or she did is wrong, thereby repeating it and even make it worse. For another, ignoring may also do harm to personal psychology. For teenagers, they haven’t formed mature reasonable thinking ability in the nascent status, therefore they may regard ignoring as his or her own fault and feel self-contemptuous, which may even last long to their adult stage and gradually lead to insular, even self-paranoid and finally a threat to society security. Many juvenile delinquencies aptly illustrate this statement. No education system hopes to carry out such consequence. Therefore, ignoring is the least term that when any school or firms take education means into consideration.

As I see it, there are many effective ways to deal with negative behaviors, such as criticism, which guide students to distinct between the right and wrong on one hand and interact with praise to promote a more fair education system on the other. Nowadays, many schools have punishment regulations, and even the society take a “tough-on-crime” approach on crime and violence. Besides, contrary to criticism, persuading and encouragement is another active approach to deal with negative behaviors. Persuading could lead students to have deep understanding of and accordingly introspect into certain issue, which have lasting and meaningful values for students’ whole life. Accompanied with persuading, teachers should then help students to rebuild confidence by encouraging them to correct their problems and behave in ethic ways. I believe this way should be advocated in all societies with humanity and civilization.

In the final analysis, the speaker is on the right philosophical side of the issue about praising positive behaviors, however overlooks the disadvantages that ignoring negative behavior may lead to. Besides, there are many other efficient ways that could lead to better education and it is hard to set a criteria of which way is the best. Anyway, education is a long-term process that need every effective way contribute to.