自考英语综合一下册课文 lesson 6

　　[00:00.00]Text   Another School Year--What For?

[00:06.79]Let me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher.

[00:12.12]It was January of 1940

[00:15.96]and I was fresh out of graduate school starting my first semester at a university

[00:21.92]A tall boy came into my class,sat down,

[00:26.07]folded his arms,and looked at me as if to say:

[00:30.43]"All right,damn you,teach me something."

[00:34.80]Two weeks later we started Hamlet.

[00:38.74]Three weeks later he came into my office with his hands on his hips 1.

[00:43.89]"Look,"he said,"I came here to be a pharmacist.Why do I have to read this stuf?"

[00:51.46]He pointed 2 to the book which was lying on the desk.

[00:55.59]New as I was to the faculty 3,

[00:59.12]I could have told this boy that he had enrolled 5,

[01:03.48]not in a technical training school,but in a university,

[01:08.52]and that in a university students enroll 4 for both training and education.

[01:14.68]I tried to put it this way.

[01:17.92]"For the rest of your life,"I said,

[01:21.37]"your days are going to average out to about twenty-four hours.

[01:26.23]For eight of these hours,more or less,you will be asleep,

[01:30.91]and I suppose you need neither education nor training to get you through that third of your life.

[01:37.15]"Then for about eight hours of each working day you will,I hope,

[01:42.11]be usefully employed.

[01:45.35]Suppose you have gone through pharmacy 6 school

[01:49.40]--or engineering,or law school,or whatever

[01:53.84]--during those eight hours you will be using your professional skills.

[01:58.70]You will see to it during this third of your life

[02:02.85]that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin 7,

[02:07.01]that the bull doesn't jump the fence,

[02:10.66]or that your client doesn't go to the electric chair

[02:15.03]as a result of your incompetence 8.

[02:18.79]These involve skills every must respect,

[02:22.94]and they can all bring you good basic satisfactions.

[02:27.70]Along with everything else,

[02:31.04]they will probably be what provides food for your table,

[02:35.51]supports your wife,and rears your children.

[02:39.76]They will be your income,and may it always be sufficient.

[02:44.81]"But having finished the day's work,

[02:48.46]what do you do with those other eight hours-

[02:52.02]-with the other third of your life?

[02:55.49]Let's say you go home to your family.

[02:58.94]What sort of family are you raising?

[03:02.60]Will the children ever be exposed to a profound idea at home?

[03:07.77]We all think of ourselves as citizens of a great civilization.

[03:12.73]Civilizations can exist,however,

[03:16.70]only as long as they remain intellectually alive.

[03:21.06]Will you be head of a family that maintains some basic contact with the great continuity of civilized 9 intellect?

[03:28.51]Or is your family life going to be merely beer on ice?

[03:32.98]Will there be a book in the house?Will there be a painting?

[03:37.94]Will your family be able to speak English and to talk about an idea?

[03:43.19]Will the kids ever get to hear Bach?"

[03:46.82]That is about what I said,but this boy was not interested."

[03:52.07]Look,"he said,"you professors raise your kids your way;

[03:57.53]I'll take care of my own.Me,I'm out to make money."

[04:02.81]"I hope you make a lot of it,"I told him,

[04:06.47]"because you're going to be badly in need of something to do when you're not signing checks."

[04:11.92]Fourteen years later,I am still teaching,

[04:16.00]and I am here to tell you that the business of the college is not only to train you

[04:21.56]but to put you in touch with what the best human minds have thought.

[04:26.32]If you have no time for Shakespeare,for a basic look at philosophy,

[04:30.08]for the fine arts,for that lesson of man's development we call history-

[04:37.73]-then you have no business being in college.

[04:41.57]You are on your way to being the mechanized savage 10,the push-button savage.

[04:47.82]No one becomes a human being unaided.

[04:51.58]There is not time enough in a single lifetime to invent for oneself

　　[04:57.14]everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human.

[05:02.39]Any of you who managed to stay awake through part of a high school course in physics

[05:08.24]knows more about physics than did many of the great scientists of the past.

[05:13.60]You know more because they left you what they knew.

[05:17.75]The first course in any science is essentially 11 a history course.

[05:22.80]You have to begin learning what the past learned for you.

[05:27.18]This is true of the techniques of mankind.

[05:31.23]It is also true of mankind's spiritual resources.

[05:35.80]Most of these resources,both technical and spiritual,are stored in books.

[05:42.05]When you have read a book,you have added to your human experience.

[05:47.40]Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homer's mind.

[05:52.57]Through books you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil,Dante,Shake-speare

[05:59.52]--the list is endless.

[06:02.68]For a great book is necessarily a gift;

[06:06.84]it offers you a life you have not time to live yourself,

[06:11.51]and it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in literal time

[06:16.79]A civilized mind is one that contains many such lives and many such worlds

[06:22.85]If you are too much in a hurry,or too proud of your own limitations,

[06:28.41]to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle or Einstein,

[06:35.18]then you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen of a civilization.

[06:41.24]I say that a university has no real existence

[06:45.68]and no real purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in touch,

[06:51.53]both as specialists and as humans,

[06:55.79]with those human minds your human mind needs to include.