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1、Unit Seven The Aims of Education Alfred North Whitehead1 Culture is activity of thought,and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling.Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on Gods earth.What we should aim at producing is men who possess
2、 both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction.Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from,and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art.We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development,and that it mostly
3、takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty.As to training,the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve.A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning .Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man,who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undist
4、inguished. He answered,It is not what they are at eighteen,it is what they become afterwards that matters. 2 In training a child to activity of thought,above all things we must beware of what I will call inert ideas-that is to say,ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised,o
5、r tested,or thrown into fresh combination. 3 In the history of education,the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning,which,at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius,in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.The reason is,that they are overladden with inert ide
6、as.Education with inert ideas is not only useless.It is,above all things,harmful-Corruptio Optimi ,Pessima. Except at rare intervals of intellectual ferment,education in the past has been radically infected with inert ideas. That is the reason why uneducated clever women,who have seen much of the wo
7、rld,are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this horrible burden of inert ideas. Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against the inert ideas. Then,alas,with pathetic ignorance
8、 of human psychology,it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning. 4 Let us now ask how in our system of education we are to guard against this mental dryrot. We enunciate two educational commandments,Do not teach too many subjects,and ag
9、ain, What you teach,teach thoroughly. 5 The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas,not illumined with any spark of vitality. Let the main ideas which are introduced into a childs education be few and important,and let them be throw
10、n into every combination possible.The child should make them his own,and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of his actual life. From the very beginning of his education,the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which he has to make,is that gen
11、eral ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through his life,which is his life.By understanding I mean more than a mere logical analysis,though that is included.I mean understandingin the sense in which it is used in the French proverb,To understand all,is to forgive all.Pe
12、dants sneer at an education which is useful. But if education is not useful,what is it?Is it a talent,to be hidden away in a napkin? Of course,education should be useful,whatever your aim in life.It was useful to Saint Augustine and it was useful to Napoleon. It is useful,because understanding is us
13、eful. 6 I pass lightly over that understanding which should be given by the literary side of education.Nor do I wish to be supposed to pronounce on the relative merits of a classical or a modern curriculum.I would only remark that the understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent p
14、resent.The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.No more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by depreciation of the present.The present contains all that there is.It is holy ground;for it is the past,and it is the future.At the same time it must be observed that an
15、 age is no less past if it existed two hundred years ago than if it existed two thousand years ago.Do not be deceived by the pendantry of dates.The ages of Shakespeare and of Moliere are no less past than are the ages of Sophocles and of Virgil. The communion of saints is a great and inspiring assem
16、blage,but it has only one possible hall of meeting,and that is,the present;and the mere lapse of time through which any particular group of saints must travel to reach that meeting-place,makes very little difference. 7 Passing now to the scientific and logical side of education,we remember that here
17、 also ideas which are not utilised are positively harmful.By utilising an idea,I mean relating it to that stream,compounded of sense perceptions,feelings,hopes,desires,and of mental activities adjusting thought to thought,which forms our life.I can imagine a set of beings which might fortify their s
18、ouls by passively reviewing disconnected ideas. Humanity is not built that way-except perhaps some editors of newwspapers. 8 In scientific training,the first thing to do with an idea is to prove it.But allow me for one moment to extend the meaning of prove,I mean-to prove its worth.Now an idea is no
19、t worth much unless the propositions in which it is embodied are true.Accordingly an essential part of the proof of an idea is the proof,either by experiment or by logic,of the truth of the propositions. But it is not essential that this proof of the truth should constitute the first introduction to
20、 the idea. After all, its assertion by the authority of respectable teachers is sufficient evidence to begin with.In our first contact with a set of propositions,we commence by appreciating their importance.That is what we all do in after-life. We do not attempt,in the strict sense,to prove or to di
21、sprove anything,unless its importance makes it worthy of that honour. These two processes of proof,in the narrow sense,and of appreciation,do not require a rigid separation in time. Both can be proceeded with nearly concurrently. But in so far as either process must have the priority,it should be th
22、at of appreciation by use. 9 Furthermore,we should not endeavour to use propositions in isolation.Emphatically I do not mean, a neat little set of experiments to illustrate Proposition 1 and then the proof of Proposition 1,a neat little set of experiments to illustrate Proposition 11 and then the pr
23、oof of Proposition 11,and so on to the end of the book.Nothing could be more boring. Interrelated truths are utilised en bloc,and the various propositions are employed in any order,and with any reiteration. Choose some important applications of your theoretical subject;and study them concurrently wi
24、th the systematic theoretical exposition. Keep the theoretical exposition short and simple,but let it be strict and rigid so far as it goes. It should not be too long for it to be easily known with thoroughness and accuracy. The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are d
25、eplorable. Also the theory should not be muddle up with the practice. The child should have no doubt when it is proving and when it is utilising. My point is that what is proved should be utilised,and that what is utilised should-so far as is practicable-be proved. I am far from asserting that proof
26、 and utilisation are the same thing. From: L. G. Kirszner and S. R. Mandell, pp.287-289.Unit Eight Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem James Baldwin1 The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal. And they are hated for the same
27、reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil rights commissions are set up. 2 The projects are hideous, of course, there being a law, apparently respected
28、 throughout the world, that popular housing shall be as cheerless as a prison. They are lumped all over Harlem, colorless, bleak, high, and revolting. The wide windows look out on Harlems invincible and indescribable squalor: the Park Avenue railroad tracks, around which, about forty years ago, the
29、present dark community began; the unrehabilitated houses, bowed down, it would seem, under the great weight of frustration and bitterness they contain; the dark, the ominous schoolhouses, from which the child may emerge maimed, blinded, hooked, or enraged for life; and the churches, churches, block
30、upon block of churches, niched in the walls like cannon in the walls of a fortress. Even if the administration of the projects were not so insanely humiliating (for example: one must report raises in salary to the management, which will then eat up the profit by raising ones rent; the management has
31、 the right to know who is staying in your apartment; the management can ask you to leave, at their discretion), the projects would still be hated because they are an insult to the meanest intelligence. 3 Harlem got its first private project, Riverton - which is now, naturally, a slum - about twelve
32、years ago because at that time Negroes were not allowed to live in Stuyvesant Town. Harlem watched Riverton go up, therefore, in the most violent bitterness of spirit, and hated it long before the builders arrived. They began hating it at about the time people began moving out of their condemned hou
33、ses to make room for this additional proof of how thoroughly the white world despised them. And they had scarcely moved in, naturally, before they began smashing windows, defacing walls, urinating in the elevators, and fornicating in the playgrounds. Liberals, both white and black, were appalled at
34、the spectacle. I was appalled by the liberal innocence - or cynicism, which comes out in practice as much the same thing. Other people were delighted to be able to point to proof positive that nothing could be done to better the lot of the colored people. They were, and are, right in one respect: th
35、at nothing can be done as long as they are treated like colored people. The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else. No amount of “improvement” can sweeten this fact. Whatever money is now being earmarked to improve thi
36、s, or any other ghetto, might as well be burnt. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence. 4 Similarly, the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive. None of commissioner Kennedys policemen, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by
37、the people they swagger about in twos and threes controlling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that worlds real intentions are, simply, for that worlds criminal profit
38、 and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt. Rare, indeed, is the Harlem citizen, from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who
39、 does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality. I myself have witnessed and endured it more than once. The businessman and racketeers also have a story. And so do the prostitutes. (And this is not, perhaps, the place to discuss Harlems very complex attitude toward
40、s black policemen, nor the reasons, according to Harlem, that they are nearly all downtown.) 5 It is hard, on the other hand, to blame the policeman, blank, good-natured, thoughtless, and insuperably innocent, for being such a perfect representative of the people he serves. He, too, believes in good
41、 intentions and is astounded and offended when they are not taken for the deed. He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hated - which of us has? - and yet he is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. There is no way for him not to know it: ther
42、e are few other things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people. He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where, he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes. And
43、 he is not the only one who knows why he is always in company: the people who are watching him know why, too. Any street meeting, sacred or secular, which he and his colleagues uneasily cover has as its explicit or implicit burden the cruelty and injustice of the white domination. And these days, of
44、 course, in terms increasingly vivid and jubilant, it speaks of the end of that domination. The white policeman, standing on a Harlem street corner, finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world. He is not prepared for it - naturally, nobody is - and, what is possibly
45、 much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him. Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagination, something must seep in. He cannot avoid observing that some of the children, in spite of their color, remind him of child
46、ren he has known and loved, perhaps even of his own children. He knows that he certainly does not want his children living this way. He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes
47、more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyones astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the
48、 land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.From: J. Clifford and R. DiYanni, pp. 45-47Unit Nine Roots of Freedom Edith Hamilton1 Freedoms challenge in the Atomic Age is a sobering topic.We are facing today a strange new world and we are all wond
49、ering what we are going to do with it.What are we going to do with one of our most precious possessions,freedom?The world we know ,our Western world,began with something as new as the conquest of space.2 Some 2,500 years ago Greece discovered freedom.Before that there was no freedom.There were great civilizations,splendid empires,but no freedom anywhere.Egypt,Babylon,Nineveh, were all tyrannies,one immensely powerful man ruling over helpless masses.In Greece,i
