失當的美國精英教育 被遺忘的荒地

This summer, The New Republic published the Most read article in that magazine’s history. It was an essay by William Deresiewicz, drawn from his new book, “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.”

今年夏天，《新共和》(The New Republic)發表了創刊以來的最熱門文章。此文節選自威廉·德雷謝維奇(William Deresiewicz)的新書：《優秀的綿羊：失當的美國精英教育以及如何擁有富於意義的人生》(Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life)。

Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

德雷謝維奇提出了一個有關如何從青春期步入成年的觀點。他寫道，每個人生來都有一副頭腦，但只有通過內省、觀察，把理智與情感結合起來，從經驗中探尋意義，找到一個總體性的目標，才能形成獨特和個性化的自我。

This process, he argues, often begins in college, the interval of freedom when a person is away from both family and career. During that interval, the young person can throw himself with reckless abandon at other people and learn from them.

他說，這個過程通常開始於大學時期，這是人生中的一段自由時光，既沒有家庭負擔，也沒有事業上的牽絆。在這段時間，年輕人可以不顧後果、無拘無束地接觸他人，並向他們學習。

Some of these people are authors who have written great books. Some are professors who can teach intellectual rigor. Some are Students who can share work that is intrinsically rewarding.

這些人包括寫下偉大作品的作家；教人嚴謹治學的教授；還有能夠分享有益成果的同學。

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

用哥倫比亞大學教授馬克·里爾拉(Mark Lilla)的話說，通過這個過程，一名學生能夠發現，“什麼纔是值得追求的”。

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 being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

德雷謝維奇稱，在如今的精英學府，多數學生並沒有過這種經歷。他說，大學已經被商業精神同化。它非但沒有成爲人生的自由時段，卻變成了加速階段。學生們忙着跨過履歷競賽的一個個障礙，沒時間思考自己真正想要什麼。他們是如此瘋狂地嘗試着一切，卻錯過了能改變人生的際遇。他們唯恐失去任何選項。他們被反覆灌輸的，是對名望的渴望，以及對從事可能讓自己的地位岌岌可危的事情的恐懼。

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

這個體系迫使他們變得優秀，只不過是優秀的綿羊。

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

哈佛大學(Harvard)傑出的心理學教授史蒂文·平克(Steven Pinker)在文章中對德雷謝維奇的觀點做了最全面的迴應。“也許我代表了美國精英教育錯誤的一面，但我完全不知道如何讓學生建立起自我，也不知道如何讓他們成爲擁有高尚情操的人。研究生院不會教學生做這些事，在我所參與的數百個教職崗位的任命和提拔決定中，我們也從來不會評估一個候選人在這一點上做的好不好。”

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

平克的意思是，大學的使命是認知上的。年輕人應該知道如何清楚地寫作和用數據進行推理。他們應該習得具體的知識：地球的歷史、人體的工作原理、不同文化之間的差異，等等。

The way to select students into the elite colleges is not through any mysterious peering into applicants’ souls, Pinker continues. Students should be selected on the basis of standardized test scores:the S.A.T.’s. If colleges admitted kids with the highest scores and companies hired applicants with the highest scores, Pinker writes, “many of the perversities of the current system would vanish overnight.”

選拔學生進入精英學府的過程，並不是對申請者的靈魂的神祕審視，平克接着說。對學生的選拔應該基於標準化考試的分數，也就是SAT的成績。如果大學錄取了分數最高的孩子，企業錄用了分數最高的應聘者，平克寫道，“當前制度的許多反常之處就會迅速消失。”

What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Pinker’s cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and Deresiewicz’s moral purpose (building an integrated self).

因此，我們面對的是大學教育的三個不同目的：商業目的（爲職業發展做準備）、平克所說的認知目的（獲得信息並學會思考），以及德雷謝維奇的道德目的（塑造完整的自我）。

Over a century ago, most university administrators and faculty members would have said the moral purpose is the most important. As Mary Woolley, the president of Mount Holyoke, put it, “Character is the main object of education.” The most prominent Harvard psychology professor then, William James, wrote essays on the structure of the morally significant life. Such a life, he wrote, is organized around a self-imposed, heroic ideal and is pursued through endurance, courage, fidelity and struggle.

一個多世紀前，多數大學管理者和教職員工會說，道德目的最重要。正如曼荷蓮學院(Mount Holyoke College)院長瑪麗·伍利(Mary Woolley)所說，“教育的主要對象是品格。”當時非常著名的哈佛大學心理學教授威廉·詹姆斯(William James)在多篇文章中談論了在道德方面有所建樹的人生的構成。他寫道，這樣的一生，是圍繞着一個自願承擔的崇高理想建立起來的，是通過耐力、勇氣、忠誠和奮鬥實現的。

Today, people at these elite institutions have the same moral aspirations. Everybody knows the meritocratic system has lost its mind. Everybody — administrators, admissions officers, faculty and students — knows that the pressures of the résumé race are out of control.

如今，精英學院的人們有同樣的道德追求。所有人都知道精英管理的系統已經失去了理智。所有人——管理者、招生負責人、教職員工和學生們——都知道，履歷競賽的壓力已經失控。

But people in authority no longer feel compelled to define how they think moral, emotional and spiritual growth happens, beyond a few pablum words that no one could disagree with and a few vague references to community service. The reason they don’t is simple. They don’t think it’s their place, or, as Pinker put it, they don’t think they know.

但當權者已經不再認爲自己必須說清楚他們認爲道德、情感和精神的成長是如何發生的，他們只會說一些所有人都同意的平淡無奇的話語，或者偶爾模糊地提起社區服務的例子。他們這樣做的理由很簡單。他們不認爲這是他們的職責，或者，正如平克所說，他們不認爲自己知道答案。

The result is that the elite universities are strong at delivering their commercial mission. They are pretty strong in developing their cognitive mission. But when it comes to the sort of growth Deresiewicz is talking about, everyone is on their own. An admissions officer might bias her criteria slightly away from the Résumé God and toward the quirky kid. A student may privately wrestle with taking a summer camp job instead of an emotionally vacuous but résumé-padding internship. But these struggles are informal, isolated and semi-articulate.

結果就是，精英學府十分擅長完成它們的商業使命。它們也相當擅長髮展認知上的使命。至於德雷謝維奇提到的那種成長，所有人都只能靠自己。一名招生負責人自己的標準可能稍稍傾向於古怪的學生，而不是擁有完美簡歷的人。一名學生可能私下裏經過一番掙扎後，選擇了一份夏令營的工作，而不是情感上空洞無物但能夠爲簡歷增色的實習。但這些掙扎都是非正式的、孤立的、不太說得清的。

I’d say Deresiewicz significantly overstates the amount of moral decay at elite universities. But at least he reminds us what a moral education looks like. That is largely abandoned ground.

在我看來，德雷謝維奇嚴重高估了精英學府道德衰退的程度。不過，他至少提醒了我們，道德教育是怎樣的。現在來看，那基本上是一塊被遺棄的荒地。