现代大学英语精读2课文.docx

1、现代大学英语精读2课文Unit1Another School Year What For Let me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher. It was January of 1940 and I was fresh out of graduate school starting my first semester at the University of Kansas City. Part of the student body was a beanpole with hair on top wh

2、o came into my class, sat down, folded his arms, and looked at me as if to say All right, teach me something. Two weeks later we started Hamlet. Three weeks later he came into my office with his hands on his hips. Look, he said, I came here to be a pharmacist. Why do I have to read this stuff And no

3、t having a book of his own to point to, he pointed to mine which was lying on the desk. New as I was to the faculty, I could have told this specimen a number of things. I could have pointed out that he had enrolled, not in a drugstore-mechanics school, but in a college and that at the end of his cou

4、rse meant to reach for a scroll that read Bachelor of Science. It would not read: Qualified Pill-Grinding Technician. It would certify that he had specialized in pharmacy, but it would further certify that he had been exposed to some of the ideas mankind has generated within its history. That is to

5、say, he had not entered a technical training school but a university and in universities students enroll for both training and education. I could have told him all this, but it was fairly obvious he wasnt going to be around long enough for it to matter. Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high sen

6、se of duty and I tried to put it this way: For the rest of your life, I said, your days are going to average out to about twenty-four hours. They will be a little shorter when you are in love, and a little longer when you are out of love, but the average will tend to hold. For eight of these hours,

7、more or less, you will be asleep. Then for about eight hours of each working day you will, I hope, be usefully employed. Assume you have gone through pharmacy school or engineering, or law school, or whatever during those eight hours you will be using your professional skills. You will see to it tha

8、t the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesnt jump the fence, or that your client doesnt go to the electric chair as a result of your incompetence. These are all useful pursuits. They involve skills every man must respect, and they can all bring you basic satisfactions. Along with eve

9、rything else, they will probably be what puts food on your table, supports your wife, and rears your children. They will be your income, and may it always suffice. But having finished the days work, what do you do with those other eight hours Lets say you go home to your family. What sort of family

10、are you raising Will the children ever be exposed to a reasonably penetrating idea at home Will you be presiding over a family that maintains some contact with the great democratic intellect Will there be a book in the house Will there be a painting a reasonably sensitive man can look at without shu

11、ddering Will the kids ever get to hear Bach That is about what I said, but this particular pest was not interested. Look, he said, you professors raise your kids your way; Ill take care of my own. Me, Im out to make money. I hope you make a lot of it, I told him, because youre going to be badly stuc

12、k for something to do when youre not signing checks. Fourteen years later I am still teaching, and I am here to tell you that the business of the college is not only to train you, but to put you in touch with what the best human minds have thought. If you have no time for Shakespeare, for a basic lo

13、ok at philosophy, for the continuity of the fine arts, for that lesson of mans development we call history then you have no business being in college. You are on your way to being that new species of mechanized savage, the push-button Neanderthal. Our colleges inevitably graduate a number of such li

14、fe forms, but it cannot be said that they went to college; rather the college went through them without making contact. No one gets to be a human being unaided. There is not time enough in a single lifetime to invent for oneself everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human. Assume,

15、for example, that you want to be a physicist. You pass the great stone halls of, say, M. I. T., and there cut into the stone are the names of the scientists. The chances are that few, if any, of you will leave your names to be cut into those stones. Yet any of you who managed to stay awake through p

16、art of a high school course in physics, knows more about physics than did many of those great scholars of the past. You know more because they left you what they knew, because you can start from what the past learned for you. And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so it is true of mankinds spiritual resources. Most of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books are mans peculiar accom