GRE珍贵资料 seven_teen整理.doc

竞争What American schools do effectively teach is the competitive method. In innumerable ways children are pitted against each otherwhether in classroom discussion, spelling bees, reading groups, or tests. Every classroom is expected to produce a scattering of As and Fs (teachers often grade A=excellent; B=good; C=average; D=poor; and F=failed). A teacher who gives all As looks too softso students are aware that they are competing for the limited number of top marks. 标准和道德The truth of the real world is that without standards and judgments, there can be no progress. Unless we are prepared to say irrational thingsthat nothing can be proven more valuable than anything else or that everything is equally worthlesswe must ask the normative question. 道德But there are values that all American citizens share and that we should want all American students to know and to make their own: honesty, fairness, self-discipline, fidelity to task, friends, and family, personal responsibility, love of country, and belief in the principles of liberty, equality, and the freedom to practice ones faith. 教育孩子老师作则There is no escaping the fact that young people need as examples principals and teachers who know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, and who themselves exemplify high moral purpose.教育孩子家长作则You cant expect children to take messages about rules or morality seriously unless they see adults taking those rules seriously in their day-to-day affairs. Certain things must be said, certain limits laid down, and certain examples set. There is no other way.重视教育As any parent knows, teaching character is a difficult task. But it is a crucial task, because we want our children to be not only healthy, happy, and successful but decent, strong, and good. None of this happens automatically; there is no genetic transmission of virtue. It takes the conscious, committed efforts of adults. It takes careful attention.失败，错误 与成功Most people consider success and failure as opposites, but they are actually both products of the same process. As Yaz suggests, an activity which produces a hit may also produce a miss. It is the same with creative thinking; the same energy which generates good creative ideas also produces errors. Many people, however, are not comfortable with errors. Our educational system, based on the right answer belief, cultivates our thinking in another, more conservative way. From an early age, we are taught that right answers are good and incorrect answers are bad. This value is deeply embedded in the incentive system used in most schools:不敢失败和保守的态度With this kind of attitude, you arent going to be taking too many chances. If you learn that failing even a little penalizes you (e.g., being wrong only 15% of the time garners you only a B performance), you learn not to make mistakes. And more important, you learn not to put yourself in situations where you might fail. This leads to conservative thought patterns designed to avoid the stigma our society puts on failure.From a practical point of view, to err is wrong makes sense. Our survival in the everyday world requires us to perform thousands of small tasks without failure. Think about it: you wouldnt last very long if you were to step out in front of traffic or stick your hand into a pot of boiling water. In addition, engineers whose bridges collapse, stock brokers who lose money for their clients, and copywriters whose ad campaigns decrease sales wont keep their jobs very long. Nevertheless, too great an adherence to the belief to err is wrong can greatly undermine your attempts to generate new ideas. If you are more concerned with producing right answers than generating original ideas, youll probably make uncritical use of the rules, formulae, and procedures used to obtain these right answers. By doing this, youll by-pass the germinal phase of the creative process, and thus spend little time testing assumptions, challenging the rules, asking what-if questions, or just playing around with the problem. All of these techniques will produce some incorrect answers, but in the germinal phase errors are viewed as a necessary by-product of creative thinking. As Yaz would put it, if you want the hits, be prepared for the misses. Thats the way the game of life goes.失败的名人例子！太好啦！ As a matter of fact, the whole history of discovery is filled with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity because of assumptions which were right for the wrong reasons. And, Thomas Edison knew 1800 ways not to build a light bulb.这一段好哪！失败走向成功的例子Negative Feedback Errors serve another useful purpose: they tell us when to change direction. When things are going smoothly, we generally dont think about them. To a great extent, this is because we function according to the principle of negative feedback. Often it is only when things or people fail to do their job that they get our attention. For example, you are probably not thinking about your kneecaps right now; thats because everything is fine with them. The same goes for your elbows: they are also performing their functionno problem at all. But if you were to break a leg, you would immediately notice all of the things you could no longer do, but which you used to take for granted. Negative feedback means that the current approach is not working, and it is up to you to figure out a new one. We learn by trial and error, not by trial and rightness. If we did things correctly every time, we would never have to change directionwed just continue the current course and end up with more of the same. For example, after the supertanker Amoco Cadiz broke up off the coast of Brittany in the spring of 1978, thereby polluting the coast with hundreds of thousands of tons of oil, the oil industry rethought many of its safety standards regarding petroleum transport. The same thing happened after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979many procedures and safety standards were changed.We learn by our failures. A persons errors are the whacks that lead him to think something different.引用 The creative director of an advertising agency told me that he isnt happy unless he is failing at least half of the time. As he puts it, If you are going to be original, you are going to be wrong a lot. One of my clients, the president of a fast-growing computer company, tells his people: Were innovators. Were doing things nobody has ever done before. Therefore, we are going to be making mistakes. My advice to you: make your mistakes, but make them in a hurry.Natures Errors Nature serves as a good example of how trial and error can be used to make changes. Every now and then genetic mutations occurerrors in gene reproduction. Most of the time, these mutations have a deleterious effect on the species, and they drop out of the gene pool. But occasionally, a mutation provides the species with something beneficial, and that change will be passed on to future generations. The rich variety of all species is due to this trial and error process. If there had never been any mutations from the first amoeba, where would we be now?If youre not making many errors, you might ask yourself, How many opportunities am I missing by not being more aggressive?Remember these two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesnt work; and second, the failure gives you an opportunity to try a new approach.我们学不完，我们不象Aristotle，我们要怎么学Unlike Aristotle who is believed to have known everything there was to know at the time he lived, it is impossible for us to deal with the voluminous amounts of information which are produced daily. The lifelong learning which we have alluded to will not always be acquired through the traditional sixteen-week college course. We in the community college need to provide a smorgasbord of opportunities for individuals who wish to increase their mobility and options.大学要不要规定各种课程What Ive missed is an education that integrates philosophy, history, literature and the other humanities into a coherent whole. Part of the fault is my own: I did not seek out some classes that I should have. But a large share of the burden lies with the university, which lacks a core curriculumfor example, Great Booksthat could provide a general education.好比喻，大学的作用，专业课的不全面的危害Undergraduates are therefore denied the opportunity to pursue a comprehensive curriculum. Instead, they are left, like shoppers in a giant supermarket, to wander the aisles, picking products at random, never sure that their selections will add up to a nutritious meal. Laissez faire may work in the economy, but its no way to run a university. 太注重专业课First, granting that our graduates know a good deal, their knowledge lies about in fragments and never gets welded together into the stuff of a tempered and mobile mind. Secondly, our university graduates have been so busy boring holes for themselves, acquiring special knowledge and skills, that in later life they have astonishingly little in common in the way of ideas, standards, or principles, Thirdly, it is alleged that the past two decades have revealed a singular want of clarity about the great ends of living, attachment to which gives significance and direction to a life. 真是好！苏格拉底说真正的教育But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not inserting the stuffings of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing out of what is in the mind. The most important part of education, once wrote William Ernest Hocking, the distinguished Harvard philosopher, is this instruction of a man in what he has inside him. And, as Edith Hamilton has reminded us, Socrates never said, I know, learn from me. He said, rather, Look into your own selves and find the spark of truth that God has put into every heart, and that only you can kindle to a flame.电信和技术的发展1. The development of information technologies. Throughout the world, information and telecommunication technologies are bringing about a new industrial revolution which already looks to be as important and radical as those revolutions which preceded it.全球化2. Internationalization is connected both with political situation and with the development of technologies. Nowadays our world is becoming smaller and smaller, and turns into a global village. International academic cooperation is an excellent basis for nation-wide cooperation and one of the key factors for sustainable development. 传统教学模式的转变The learning community reflects a shift away from the typical lecture approach where the professor professes, i.e. imparts knowledge to the student and the student simply takes it down and takes it in. The new emphasis will be on learning, in addition to the lecture through student initiative in setting the program, acquiring knowledge through the Internet as needed, collaborating with peers in special projects, experiential learning through internships, study abroad, and many other out-of-classroom experiences.需要全面发展，对研究也是如此The research role will continue to be a key function in the research university, but there will continue to be a shift in emphasis away from single investigator, working on a particular and narrow area, toward multi-disciplinary teams working on problems driven by societal need. 职业培训和教育Training is intended primarily for the service of society; education is primarily for the individual. Society needs doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers to perform specific tasks necessary to its operation, just as it needs carpenters and plumbers and stenographers. Training supplies the immediate and specific needs of society so that the work of the world may continue. And these needs, our training centers the professional and trade schools fill. But although education is for the improvement of the individual, it also serves society by providing a leavening of men of understanding, of perception, and wisdom. They are our intellectual leaders, the critics of our culture, the defenders of our free traditions, the instigators of our progress. They serve society by examining its function, appraising its needs, and criticizing its direction. They may be earning their livings by practicing one of the professions, or in pursuing a trade, or by engaging in business enterprise. They may be rich or poor. They may occupy positions of power and prestige, or they may be engaged in some humble employment. Without them, however, society either disintegrates or else becomes an anthill.艺术/ 全面教育In the liberal arts college, on the other hand, the student is encouraged to explore new fields and old fields, to wander down the bypaths of knowledge. There the teaching is concerned with major principles, and its purpose is to change the student, to make him something different from what he was before, just as the purpose of the Y gym is to make a fat man into a thin one, or a strong one out of a weak one.专业课和艺术In general, certain courses of study are for the service of society and other courses are for self-improvement. In the hierarchy of our educational system, the former are the function of our professional schools and the latter are the function of the college of liberal arts.智慧是什么There are, I think, several factors that contribute to wisdom. Of these I should put first a sense of proportion: the capacity to take account of all the important factors in a problem and to attach to each its due weight. 有关智慧和人类Comprehensiveness alone, however, is not enough to constitute wisdom. There must be, also, a. certain awareness of the ends of human life.要的It is not only in public ways, but in private life equally, that wisdom is needed. It is needed in the choice of ends to be pursued and in emancipation from personal prejudice. 理智的作用 ，满好的I think the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the tyranny of the here and the now. We cannot help the egoism of our senses. Sight and sound and touch are bound up with our own bodies and cannot be made impersonal. Our emotions start similarly titan ourselves. An infant feels hunger or discomfort, and is unaffected except by his own physical condition. Gradually with the years, his horizon widens, and, in proportion as his thoughts and feelings become less personal and less concerned with his own physical states, he achieves growing wisdom. This is of course a matter of degree. No one can view the world with complete impartiality; and if anyone could, he would hardly be able to remain alive. but it is possible to make a continual approach towards impartiality, on the one hand, by knowing things somewhat remote in time or space, and, on the other hand, by giving to such things their due weight in our feelings. It is this approach towards impartiality that constitutes growth in wisdom.计算机与教育：对学生和老师Computers enhance a students learning experience in many ways. First of all, the computer has the ability to accommodate individual differences in learning speed because the user (the student) is the one who controls the pace of the lessons. In addition, because a computer Is nonjudgmental, the learner does not have to be afraid of reprisal or humiliation when making errors. For example, because computers can repeat information over and over, the user can ask for many repetitions of a lesson without fearing a judgmental response about his or her ability to learn. The beneficial effects of learning in a stress-free atmosphere are well documented. A third advantage of CAI is that a computer can give a student immediate feedback. It can tell the student why she or he is wrong as soon as an error is made, and it can even provide an appropriate hint for figuring out the correct answer. Not only do computers benefit students, they also make the teachers job easier. One advantage lies in the preparation of instructional materials. Schools and colleges can purchase educational computer programs that can be adapted to any learning situation. These systems, called authoring systems, are like skeletal lesson plans: The format of several exercises and tests is already planned out; all the teacher adds is the information he or she wants the students to learn (mathematical problems, vocabulary lists, and so forth). The authoring system automatically incorporates these teaching points into its preplanned format and then is ready to be used by several students for a long time. The system can also correct the students work and determine and record grades. In addition, the computer offers numerous advantages to teachers in managing their classrooms. A computer laboratory (a room having one computer for every two students) can free the teacher to meet individually with students while the rest of the class is occupied with computer lessons. Finally, computers can help teachers keep student records and chart student progress, thereby cutting down on time-consuming paperwork.计算机引发疾病In an atmosphere of computer monitoring, inept work stations, inflexible pacing, and nerve-wracking anxiety, workmans compensation claims based on job stress have more than doubled since 1980, and now account for approximately 15 percent of all occupational disease claims. According to estimates by the OTA, stress-related illness costs business, between $50 and $75 billion per year.太阳能：环保的潜力But the era of solar power will have to wait for the cost of converting sunlight to fall far enough to pay for the cost of installing a system. Solar is competitive now if you take the long view, says SMUD general manager Freeman. And its goin