题目：

　　It is primarily through formal education that a culture tries to perpetuate the ideas it favors and discredit the ideas it fears.

　　如果一个文化想要它认为好的理念永世长存而摈弃它厌恶的理念，主要是通过正规的教育。

　　正文：

　　Admittedly it is true that any society hopes to perpetuate its culture and values by means of formal education, but this does not mean that formal education can really function best to this purpose as the society expects.

　　The modern era is vividly characterized by its highly advanced formal educational system: almost every country in the contemporary world deems the education as the most important social section and allocates the largest part of public resources for the development of formal education. However, along with this unprecedented emphasis on the formal education, the modern society finds it more and more difficult to instill its favored ideas, values and traditions into its students and social members. For example,no country encourages its social members to divorce but the divorce rate all over the world has witnessed a striking increase since the 2nd World War. On the country, in the past society in which formal education was very backward and available to only a few people, the ideas and traditions that a culture values was much easier to be perpetuated from generations to generations. In some traditional society, many traditions have existed for even thousands of years while in the modern society everything changes rapidly and nothing can be safely regarded as permanent or having sustained values.

　　The above comparison between the modern society and the traditional society vividly indicates that the formal education can never, if any, play as an important role in perpetuating values and culture as the author believes. But how does a culture find its way to survive and spread? Historical, sociological and psychological study have long revealed that only through interactive communication between social members can people identify themselves with some social norms, traditions and cultures. People are disposed to conform to certain culture only when they observe other social members conform to it.

　　Therefore, in the traditional society, although the formal education was very backward,people were confined within a narrow area and they shaped their values and norms primarily through imitating the behaviors of their seniors and interaction between members in the same community. This traditional manner of socialization of individuals, obviously, conduces to the preservation and transition of ideas and values that a society favors. This is why traditional society was more efficient in perpetuating its favored culture.

　　The modern society heavily depends on the formal education to accumulate and create knowledge of modern science and technology, which are redeemed as the origins of social progress. However, too much emphasis on the formal education, in the sense,can even impose some negative effects on instilling ideas and values that a culture highlights into the social members. According to the analysis above, the values that children are most likely to accept are always those that can be often observed in their parents, teachers or other celebrities by children. But, the first-rate problem with the formal education is that students find no way to authenticate what teachers teach to them. Sometimes, students are even confused by the inconsistency of what teachers teach with the social reality. This determines that the formal education is destined to be of low efficiency in imbuing students with ideas and values that the society favors.

　　All societies in the world hope to imbue their students with the value of honesty through the way of formal education, for example, but whether the societies can attain this goal does not rest with the performance of formal education, but depend on the actual behaviors of politicians, teachers, movie stars, businessmen and so on. In a society where politicians are accustomed to tell lies and most businessmen are inclined to cheat, obviously no one should expect its students to accept such a imbued value of honesty, no matter how advanced the formal educational system may be.

　　To sum up, any culture is transited only through interaction between social members and the formal education can do little, if any, to the preservation and transition of the culture.