新视野Unit1 further reading.doc

Teaching Children at HomeRecord numbers of children are being taken out of school and taught by their parents at home. Up to 100 children a month are leaving the classroom because parents are not satisfied with schools. Around 15,000 families now teach their children at home, a rise of 50 per cent from last year, according to the latest figures. This present rise in home schooling is blamed on the nature of examinations, not getting children into the school of choice and dissatisfaction with teaching methods. Some parents prefer keeping children home because of attacks by other students and a lack of discipline in schools. Researchers say, however, many families prefer teaching at home because they feel the idea of public schooling is not modern. They believe schools will be things of the past in 20 years as media technology, like the Internet (因特网), teaches children. Under the law, parents must teach their children, whether at school or at home. Community officials are charged (被指控) with protecting their schooling. Professor Meighan of Nottingham University says parents were fed up with the requirements of existing schools. For him, schools are an out-of-date concept from the days of the town crier (市政传令员), when it was difficult to get information and a central person was needed to communicate that knowledge. He also thinks parents are recognizing that education is moving on and dont want their children to be held back by out-of-date methods. Meighan suggests children will be taught at home using the Internet, computers, and video (录像片). He thinks future schools will be small groups of children sharing equipment in their homes. The teachers may become advisers who sort through the information. Sir Christopher Ball of the Royal (皇家的) Society of Arts questioned the future of schooling. He thinks learning in the future will include an international curriculum and international standards. He sees some present models of schooling - community schools and home schooling, for example - becoming more central and other models, not yet existing, developing. How Personal Choice Brings O-Level Success at 13Leslie Barson is already running the type of school that researchers think will teach children in the future. Based partly at a community centre and partly in family homes, the Otherwise Club includes some 35 families around north London. Professional (职业的) teachers are brought in to help with special subjects, but mostly parents and children work together on units like studying the Greeks or the American Civil War, reading about events, making costumes (戏装), and learning how people used to live. Parents choosing home schooling say the freedom of home learning allows some children to sit one or two General Certificate of Education Examinations (GCEs) by the age of 13. Ms. Barsons own children, Luis, age 12, and 7-year-old Lilly, have never attended school. She pays around 2,000 pounds a year for private teachers to help in special areas. She set up the Otherwise Club six years ago with just a few students. She thinks the purpose of teaching children is to develop their self-worth. Her son agrees. Luis, now teaching himself math, said, I like the freedom to learn things that interest me, especially music. I dont feel I am missing out on anything by not being at school because I am a member of various clubs and have friends who attend normal school. The Danger of Separating StudentsHome schooling could change childrens relations with their peers and older people because of long periods spent with their parents. Most professors agree future learning will be more centred around the home, and fear children could become isolated (孤独的) and shy. Professor Michael Barber of London University said pupils could spend half their time at school and half at home as a way to solve this problem. He believes very strongly that children need the experience of school to ensure (确保) the quality of the basics being taught and being examined. He thinks children must spend time with peers to learn the rules of work in a democratic (民主的) society and to learn how to deal with relations with more people than just their parents. Margaret Rudland, head teacher in Hammersmith, also thinks children must experience actual peer relations.What Is Art?Yasmina Rezas (雅丝米娜雷扎, 当今法国重要女剧作家之一) one-act play Art, premired in Berlin, was a huge success in Paris and then opened in London. It is about a white-on-white abstract painting that nearly ruins a friendship among three men. A character named Serge buys the painting for an extravagant sum; his friend Marc, invited to admire the new purchase, pronounces it shit; the third friend, Yvan, who has no aesthetic views (or is happy to see equal merit in both views), is made wretched by the subsequent bickering, to which most of the plays ninety minutes are devoted. As the quotation marks in the title signal, the play basically sides with Marc, the character who thinks that his friends notion of art is ridiculous. Still, it suggests, Marc is taking his outrage a shade too seriously, since, as phony as the painting probably is, theres no point in spoiling a friendship over it. This is evidently a view that suits the audience that has made Art an international success. When I saw the play in London, the audience laughed earnestly at every one of Marcs rather blunt and obvious gibes but gasped in horror when, toward the end of the play, he defaced the painting with a felt-tip pen. They agreed that the canvas had no aesthetic merit, but they felt that its market value ought to be respected. Whats odd about the play is the notion that a white-on-white canvas represents the latest refinement in avant-garde (先锋派的) pretension. White-on-white canvases were the latest refinement in avant-garde pretension forty years ago. And monochrome art didnt represent a sneer at aesthetic values. It represented the culmination of aestheticism (唯美主义), the final distillation of the idea of painting as painting. The fictional Serge has purchased one of the prime artistic products of an era that the real-life, present-day avant-garde reacts strongly against. The tasteless representational (具象派的) landscape that hangs in Marcs living room is in many respects more avant-garde than Serges new but old fashioned white-on-white painting.What does seem right about Art, though, is how inarticulate the characters become when they attempt to justify their reactions to Serges painting and how quickly the disagreement turns personal. This is what the audiences are probably responding to. Theyve been in these situations themselves, and although the relationships in the play are not very convincing (its hard to understand how these three guys ever became friends in the first place), so the damage to their friendship is not so bothersome, the situation of a disagreement about art turning into a bitter argument about personalities is easily recognized and understood.The disagreements about aesthetic opinions in Art strike a chord because most people have lost any clear sense of what a valid aesthetic argument is. In reality aesthetic arguments have become only justifications for art that people happen to like, and this seems to have become the current view on the subject. Last fall when the Times asked seventeen art-world participants and observers the question What is art?, all the experts gave the same answer. They said that the question has no answer. Art historians simply cant agree on what art is today. Art historian Thomas McEvilley says, It seems pretty clear by now that more or less anything can be designated as art. Another art historian, Robert Rosenblum, says, By now the idea of defining art is so remote I dont think anyone would dare to do it. According to William Rubin, of the Museum of Modern Art There is no single definition of art, while Philippe de Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, affirms that Theres no consensus about anything today. All agreed that there can be no definition of art because art is just whatever people say it is.The triumph of the consensus of no consensus should be gratifying to Arthur Danto, a philosopher and the art critic of the nation. Since 1984 he has been trying to explain why it is no longer possible, by referring to the way it looks, to distinguish something that is a work of art from something that is not. His argument, eloquently summed up in his most recent book, After the End of Art, is that after Andy Warhol exhibited what looked like Brillo boxes in 1964, anything could be art. With Brillo Box, the history of art came to an end. There was no longer a guide stating what form works of art should take next, because having a particular form no longer determined whether or not an item was a work of art. People in London could see realized, in an exhibition called Sensation, what Danto must have been thinking about when he wrote his book back in 1984. Sensation is a collection of items ranging from snapshots, videos, abstract paintings, and figurative paintings to found objects and dead animals. A characteristic piece called Self by Marc Quinn is listed in the catalogue as having been created in the following media: blood, stainless steel, and refrigeration equipment. Chris Ofilis works on linen were executed in oil paint, polyester resin, map pins, and elephant dung. If Serge had a Lucite box containing the head of a cow crawling with maggots on display in his living room, Art would seem a lot more up to date.Danto still believes that art has essential qualities; he just doesnt think that those qualities reside in its appearance. But its easy to slip from the recognition that anything could be art to the position that art is an arbitrary category. Danto calls his conception of post-historical art Pluralist (多元论者), meaning that all forms of expression are now permitted; and one reason so many of the people in the Times survey echo his view is th