英语范文背诵精华 10.2 Study at University
Study at University
Let me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher. It was January of 1940 and I was fresh at a graduate school, starting my first semester at a university. A tall boy came into my class, sat down, folded his arms and looked at me as if to say: “All right, damn you! Teach me something.”
Two weeks later, we started Hamlet. Three weeks later, he came into my office with his hands on his hips. “Look!” he said, “I came here to be a pharmacist, why do I have to read this stuff?” he pointed to the book, which was lying on the desk. New as I was to the faculty, I could have told the boy that he had enrolled not in a technical training school, but in a university, and that in a university, students enrolled for both training and education. I tried to put it this way:
“For the rest of your life,” I said, “your days are going to average hour to about twenty-four hours. For eight of these hours, more or less, you’ll be asleep and I suppose you’ll need the education not training to get you through that third of your life. Then for about eight hours of each working day you will, I hope, be usefully employed. Suppose you have gone through pharmacy school, or engineering or law school or what ever, during those eight hours, you will be using your professional skills, you will see tour during the third of your life that the sign art state out of the eyespring, that the bull doesn’t jump the fence or that your client doesn’t go to the electric chair as a result of your incompetence. This involves skills every man must respect and they can all bring you good basic satisfactions. Along with everything else, they will probably be what provides food for your table, supports your wife and rears your children. They will be your income and may it always be sufficient. But having finished the day’s work, what do you do with other eight hours—with the other third of your life? Let’s see you’re going home to your family. What sort of family are you raising? Will the children ever be exposed to a profound idea at home? We all think of our souls as citizens of a great civilization. Civilizations can exist, however, only as long as they’re remain intellectually alive. Who you’ll be the head of the family that maintain some basic contact with the great continuity of civilized intellect, or is your family life going to be merely be or rush? Would there be a book in the house? Would there be a painting? Would your family be able to speak English and to talk about an idea? Would the kids ever get to hip ork?”
That is about what I said. But this boy was not interested. “Look,” he said, “you professors raise your kids your way. I’ll take care of my own. Me? I ought to make money. ”
“I hope you’ll make a lot of them.” I told him, “Because you’re going to be badly in need of something to do when you’re not signing checks. Fourteen years later, I am still teaching and I am pleased to tell you that the business of the college is not only to train you but to put you in touch with what the best human minds have thought. If you have no time for Shakespeare, for a basic look at philosophy, for the finance, for that listen of man’s development—we call history, then you have no business being in college. You are on your way to be the mechanize savage, the push-button savage. No one becomes a human being unaided. There is not time enough in a single lifetime to invent for oneself everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human. Anyone of you who managed to stay a week through part of high school course and physics knows more about physics than any of the great scientists of the past. You know more because they left you what they knew. The first course in any science is essentially a history course. You have to begin learning what the past learned for you. This is true of the techniques of mankind. It is also true of mankind’s spiritual resources. Most of the resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. When you have read a book, you have added to your human experience. Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homer’s mind. Through books you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil, Danysz, Shakespeare…the list is endless. For a great book, it’s necessarily a gift. It offers you a life you have not time to live yourself and it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in leisure time. A civilized mind is one that contains many such lines and many such words. If you are too much in a hurry or too proud of your own limitations to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle or Einstein, then you are neither a developed human, nor a useful citizen of civilization. I say that university has no real existence and no real purpose except that it succeeds in putting you in touch both as specialist and as humans. With those human minds, your human mind needs to include.”
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