Andrew Delbanco must be a great teacher. A longtime faculty member at Columbia, he is devoted to the development of his students as individuals, and recognizes that their time in college should be formative: “They may still be deterred from sheer self-interest toward a life of enlarged sympathy and civic responsibility.” Like most professors devoted to teaching, he has no interest in telling undergraduates what to think, but he does want to draw them toward a sense of skepticism about the status quo and to a feeling of wonder about the natural world. College, he tells us, is a time to learn to “make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena,” to see things from another’s point of view and to develop a sense of ethical responsibility. At a time when many are trying to reduce the college years to a training period for economic competition, Delbanco reminds readers of the ideal of democratic education.
安德鲁·德尔班科(Andrew Delbanco)一定是一位伟大的老师。他长期任教于哥伦比亚大学，致力于把他的学生培养成独立的人，他认识到他们的在校时间应该有助于他们的成长：“彻底的自私可能会阻碍他们扩展同情心，影响他们负起公民的责任。”他跟大多数献身于教学的教授一样，兴趣不在于告诉本科生该思考什么，但他确实希望他们拥有对现状的怀疑精神和对自然界的好奇心。他告诉我们，大学时光真正该学习的是：“把看上去风马牛不相及的现象联系起来”、从他人的角度看待事物、培养道德责任感。现如今很多人想要缩减学院岁月，将其改造成顺应经济竞争的培训期。而在此时，德尔班科提醒读者，不要忘记民主教育的理想。
In “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be,” he recalls this ideal’s roots in English and American Protestantism. In this country, education was never supposed to be only about imparting information. It has long included character development — turning the soul away from selfish concerns and toward community. Delbanco cites Emerson’s version of this turning: “The whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening.” Even secular teachers are trying to “get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep.”
在《大学：过去，现在，以及应当怎样》("College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be")一书中，他追溯了这一理想在英国和美国新教中的根源。在美国，教育从来不只是传播信息。它一直包含着性格养成——使灵魂离开对自我的关注，转向群体。德尔班科引用了爱默生(Emerson)关于这种转向的叙述：“教师力量的全部秘密在于，相信人是可以改变的。人确实如此。他们希望觉醒。”哪怕是世俗的老师也在努力“把灵魂唤醒，从她惯常的沉睡中唤醒。”
By the end of the 19th century, this commitment to character formation, to sustaining “curiosity and humility,” as Delbanco writes, was in sharp tension with a commitment to professionalization. Colleges were becoming universities, which meant they were getting into the business of research. Community took a back seat to expertise, and schools once exclusively devoted to undergraduate learning sought prestige through the development of graduate and professional schools.
德尔班科在书中写道，到19世纪末，对性格培养、持久的“好奇与谦卑”的信奉跟对职业化的信奉产生了尖锐的冲突。大学正在变成综合性的，这意味着它们将偏向科研。群体让位给了专家，过去学校只致力于本科生教学，现在要通过发展研究生和专业学校来赢得声誉。
With the substantial increase in the number of students wanting to pursue a college degree and the expansion of the number of fields of learning that schools were expected to cover, the dream of a “common learning experience” for undergraduates faded in favor of offering a plethora of courses from which to choose. Modern universities are meant to produce knowledge through specialization, and they often reward faculty members by giving them “relief” from teaching. Our best universities are adept at steering resources to their most productive researchers, but the undergraduate curriculum gets little more than lip service. “Very few colleges tell their students what to think,” Delbanco notes, and “most are unwilling even to tell them what’s worth thinking about.”
想获得大学学位的学生越来越多，人们期望大学能够提供的专业也增加了，“共同的学习经历”的梦想褪色了，更受欢迎的是大量可供选择的课程。现代大学就是要通过专业化来生产知识，大学奖励教师的办法通常是“减轻”他们的教学任务。我们最好的大学擅长把资源分给最多产的研究者，本科生的课程只得到一堆漂亮话。“只有非常少的学院告诉它们的学生该思考什么，”德尔班科指出：“大部分学院甚至不愿意告诉学生什么值得思考。”
1 2 下一页
