失当的美国精英教育被遗忘的荒地

2014-09-24 17:41:04来源：可可英语

　　Some of these people are authors who have written great books. Some are professors who canteach intellectual rigor. Some are students who can share work that is intrinsicallyrewarding.

　　这些人包括写下伟大作品的作家;教人严谨治学的教授;还有能够分享有益成果的同学。

　　Through this process, a student is able, in the words of Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia, todiscover “just what it is that’s worth wanting.”

　　用哥伦比亚大学教授马克·里尔拉(Mark Lilla)的话说，通过这个过程，一名学生能够发现，“什么才是值得追求的”。

　　Deresiewicz argues that most students do not get to experience this in elite colleges today.Universities, he says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of beingintervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busyjumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. Theyare too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. Theyhave a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and afear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

　　德雷谢维奇称，在如今的精英学府，多数学生并没有过这种经历。他说，大学已经被商业精神同化。它非但没有成为人生的自由时段，却变成了加速阶段。学生们忙着跨过履历竞赛的一个个障碍，没时间思考自己真正想要什么。他们是如此疯狂地尝试着一切，却错过了能改变人生的际遇。他们唯恐失去任何选项。他们被反复灌输的，是对名望的渴望，以及对从事可能让自己的地位岌岌可危的事情的恐惧。

　　The system pressures them to be excellent, but excellent sheep.

　　这个体系迫使他们变得优秀，只不过是优秀的绵羊。

　　Steven Pinker, the great psychology professor at Harvard, wrote the most comprehensiveresponse to Deresiewicz. “Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with eliteAmerican education, but I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become asoul. It isn’t taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments andpromotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or shecould accomplish it.”

　　哈佛大学(Harvard)杰出的心理学教授史蒂文·平克(Steven Pinker)在文章中对德雷谢维奇的观点做了最全面的回应。“也许我代表了美国精英教育错误的一面，但我完全不知道如何让学生建立起自我，也不知道如何让他们成为拥有高尚情操的人。研究生院不会教学生做这些事，在我所参与的数百个教职岗位的任命和提拔决定中，我们也从来不会评估一个候选人在这一点上做的好不好。”

　　Pinker suggests the university’s job is cognitive. Young people should know how to writeclearly and reason statistically. They should acquire specific knowledge: the history of theplanet, how the body works, how cultures differ, etc.

　　平克的意思是，大学的使命是认知上的。年轻人应该知道如何清楚地写作和用数据进行推理。他们应该习得具体的知识：地球的历史、人体的工作原理、不同文化之间的差异，等等。

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