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Unit4 A College Preures
I am master of Branford College at Yale.I live on the campus and know the students well.(We have 485 of them.)I listen to their hopes and fears — and also to their stereo music and their piercing cries in the dead of night(“Does anybody care?”).They come to me to ask how to get through the rest of their lives.Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think.There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches.They don't want to hear such news.They want a map — right now — that they can follow directly to career security, financial security, social security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.What I wish for all students is some release from the grim grip of the future.I wish them a chance to enjoy each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a tiresome requirement in preparation for the next step.I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as educational as victory and is not the end of the world.My wish, of course, is naive.One of the few rights that America does not proclaim is the right to fail.Achievement is the national god, worshipped in our media — the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive — and glorified in our praise of poeions.In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.I see four kinds of preure working on college students today: economic preure, parental preure, peer preure, and self-induced preure.It's easy to look around for bad guys — to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the profeors for aigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard.But there are no bad guys, only victims.Today it is not unusual for a student, even one who works part time at college and full time during the summer, to have accumulated $5,000 in loans after four years — loans that the student must start to repay within one year after graduation(and incidentally, not all these loans are low-interest, as many non-students believe).Encouraged at the commencement ceremony to go forth into the world, students are already behind as they go forth.How can they not feel under preure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? Women at Yale are under even more preure than men to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society.For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society hasn't yet caught up with this fact.Along with economic preure goes parental preure.Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.I see students taking premedical courses with joyle determination.They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist.It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.“Do you want to go to medical school?” I ask them.“I gue so,” they say, without conviction, or, “Not really.”
“Then why are you going?”
“My parents want me to be a doctor.They're paying all this money and...”
Peer preure and self-induced preure are also intertwined, and they begin from the very start of freshman year.“I had a freshman student I'll call Linda,” one instructor told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible preure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time.I couldn't tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”
The story is almost funny — except that it's not.It's a symptom of all the preures put together.When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still.I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight.I wish they could sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie.I hear the rattling of typewriters in the hours before dawn.I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I get everything done?”
Probably they won't.They will get sick.They will sleep.They will oversleep.They will bug out.I've painted too grim a portrait of today's students, making them seem too solemn.That's only half of their story;the other half is that these students are nice people, and easy to like.They're quick to laugh and to offer friendship.They're more considerate of one another than any student generation I've ever known.If I've described them primarily as driven creatures who largely ignore the joyful side of life, it's because that's where the problem is — not only at Yale but throughout American education.It's why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obseed at such an early age.I tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead — that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination.I tell them that change is healthy and that people don't have to fit into pre-arranged slots.One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved succe outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year.I invite heads of companies, editors of magazines, politicians, Broadway producers, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians — a mixed bag of achievers.I ask them to say a few words about how they got started.The students always aume that they started in their present profeion and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do.But in fact, most of them got where they are by a circuitous route, after many side trips.The students are startled.They can hardly conceive of a career that was not preplanned.They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to lead them down some unforeseen trail.第4单元TEXTA 大 学 的 压 力 威廉·津瑟
我是耶鲁大学布兰福德学院的舍监。我住在校园内，非常了解学生。（我们有485名学生。）我听他们诉说自己的希望和恐惧—也听他们的立体声音乐和他们在夜深人静时发出的刺耳的喊叫（“有什么人关心吗？”）。他们到我这儿来，问我如何度过他们的余生。我主要是试图提醒他们前面的路很漫长，意想不到的变化将比他们想象得要多。将来会有足够的时间改变工作，改变职业，改变整个的态度和处理问题的方式。他们不想听这样的新闻。他们现在就想要一张地图—一张能据以直接获得职业保障、经济保障、社会保障，也许还有一座事先买好的坟墓的地图。我希望于所有学生的是从未来的严酷无情中得到一些解脱。我希望他们有机会把他们每一阶段的教育纯粹作为一种经历来享受，而不是作为一种为下一步作准备的令人厌倦的需要。我希望他们有权利试验、跌跤，并懂得失败如同胜利一样具有教育意义，失败并不是世界的末日。当然，我的希望是天真的。在美国人不赞扬的为数不多的权利之中，有一个便是失败的权利。成就是民族之神，它在我们的媒体中受到崇拜—身价百万的运动员，富有的主管人员—在我们对财富的赞美中得到荣耀。年轻人就是在这样一种强有力的国教熏陶下长大的。我发现有四种压力影响着今天的大学生：经济上的压力、父母的压力、同伴的压力，和自己导致的压力。环顾四周寻找罪魁祸首并不难—指责大学收费太高，指责教授布置作业太多，指责父母望子成龙过于心切，指责学生把自己逼得太紧。但罪魁祸首是没有的，只有受害者。如今，一个学生，甚至是一个读书时部分时间打工，暑假时做全日工作的学生，在四年之后背上5 000美元债务的情况并不罕见—这笔债务学生必须在毕业后一年之内开始偿还（顺便说一句，这些贷款并非像许多不是大学生的人们所相信的那样都是低息贷款）。虽然学生们在毕业典礼上被鼓励迈步进入这个世界，但他们刚出发就已经落后了。为准备迎接这一结账之日，他们又怎能不在整个大学期间感到处在压力之下呢？耶鲁的女生比男生压力更大，因为她们要向自己、父母和社会证明她们接受如此昂贵的教育是值得的。因为虽然她们离开大学时已经具备了出众的才能，完全可以给传统上由男性占统治地位的工作注入新鲜的领导力量，但是社会还没有认识到这一事实。伴随着经济压力而来的是父母的压力。两者不可避免地深深交织在一起。我看到学生们带着毫无欢乐的决心在修医学预科课程。他们去实验室，就像是去看牙医。这使我感到悲哀，因为我知道他们在生活的其他方面都是些高高兴兴的人。“你想进医学院吗？”我问他们。“我想是这样的吧，”他们不能肯定地说，或者“并非真的想。”“那你为什么还打算去呢？”“我的父母要我当一名医生。他们将支付所有这笔钱而且„„”来自同伴的压力和自我导致的压力也相互交织着，而且它们从一年级一开始就出现了。“我有一个一年级的学生叫琳达，”一位老师告诉我，“她进来对我说她的压力极大，因为她的室友芭芭拉比她聪明得多而且整天在学习。我没法告诉她两个小时之前芭芭拉也进来这样描述过琳达。”这个故事近乎可笑—但事实上它并不可笑。它是所有这些压力合在一起带来的一种症状。当每个学生都认为别的学生更用功、做得更好时，唯一的解决办法便是更加努力地学习。我看见学生们每天晚上吃完饭后就去图书馆，到半夜关门时才回来。我真希望他们能够有时候忘掉他们的同学，去看一场电影。天亮以前几个小时我就听见打字机的敲击声。当考试来临，论文该交时，我看到他们眼中的紧张：“我能完成所有的事情吗？”或许他们不能。他们会生病。他们会睡着。他们会睡过头。他们会退却。我对当今学生的描绘过于悲观，使他们看上去过于严肃。这只是他们的一半情况；另一半情况是，这些学生都是些可爱的人，你很容易就喜欢上他们。他们爱笑，待人友善。他们比我所了解的任何一代学生都更加相互关爱。如果我把他们主要描绘成了受到逼迫而大大忽略了生活的欢乐一面的人，那是因为这正是问题之所在—不仅在耶鲁，而且在整个美国教育界都是如此。这就是为什么我认为我们都应该为培育着这一代人的价值观感到担忧，他们年纪这么轻就这样害怕冒险，这样沉溺于目标的追求。我告诉学生们并没有一条“正确的”成功之路—他们每个人都是一个不同的人，开始的起点不同，前往的目的地也不同。我告诉他们变化是有益的，人们不必去适应事先安排好的职位。我告诉他们这个道理的办法之一便是在学年中邀请已经在校外获得成功的男女人士来同我的学生们随意交谈。我邀请公司领导、杂志编辑、政治家、百老汇的剧院老板、艺术家、作家、经济学家、摄影家、科学家、历史学家—各种各样的成功者。我请他们简单谈谈他们是如何起步的。学生们总以为他们从一开始就在干现在的工作，而且始终都知道那就是他们想干的。但事实上，他们大多数人是通过一条曲折的道路，走过不少弯路后才到达现在的位置的。学生们惊讶不已。他们简直想象不出一个不事先计划好的职业生涯。他们简直不能想象让上帝之手或者命运来引领他们沿着某条未曾预见到的小路走下去。
