Another School Year --- What For? 這篇文章作者寫上大學(xué)的意義是什么?
沒讀懂這篇文章,誰讀懂了,上大學(xué)的意義是什么?麻煩說的詳細(xì)一點(diǎn),具體一點(diǎn). 我摘抄的部分是作者的觀點(diǎn)Fourteen years later, I am still teaching, and I am here 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 continuity of the fine arts, for that lesson of man’s development we call history --- then you have no business being in college. You are on your way to being that new species of the mechanized savage, the push-button N Eeanderthal. our colleges inevitably graduate a number of such life forms,but it cannot be said that they went to college; rather the college went through them--without making contact.
8. 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.
9. Assume,for example,that you want to be a physicist. You pass the great stone halls of,say, M.I.T.,and there cut into the stone are the names of the scientists. The chance are that few, if any, of you will leave your names to be cut into those stones.Any of you who managed to stay awake through part of a high school course in physics knows more about physics than did may 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.
10. This is true of the techniques of mankind. It is also true of mankind’s spiritual resources. Most of these 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, Dante, Shakespeare --- the list is endless. For a great book is 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 literal time. A civilized mind is one that contains many such lives and many such worlds. 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 a civilization.
11. I say that a university has no real existence and no real purpose except as It succeeds in putting you in touch, both as specialists and as humans, with those human minds your human mind needs to include. The faculty, by its very existence,says implicity:"we have been aided by many people, and by many books, in our attempt to make ourselves some sort of storehouse of human experience. We are here to make available to you, as best we can, as best we can, that expertise.