现代大学英语精读2Unit1TextA原文及全文翻译如下：
Another School Year—What For?
John Ciardi
Let me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher.
It was January of1940and 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 who 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 not 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 course he meant to reach for a scroll that would 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 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 wasn't going to be around long enough for it to matter.
Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high sense 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, 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 that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin.
That the bull doesn't jump the fence, or that your client doesn't 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 everything 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 day's work, what do you do with those other eight hours? Let's say you go home to your family.What sort of family 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 shuddering? 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; I'll take care of my own. Me, I'm out to make money."
"I hope you make a lot of it," I told him, "because you're going to be badly stuck for something to do when you're 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 look at philosophy, for the continuity of the fine arts.
For that lesson of man's 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 life 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, 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 part 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 mankind's spiritual resources. Most of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books are man's peculiar accomplishment. When you have read a book, you have added to your human experience.
Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homer's mind. Through books you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—the list is endless. For a great book is necessarily a gift; it offers you a life you have not the time to live yourself.
And it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in literal time. A civilized mind is, in essence, one that contains many such lives and many such worlds.If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle, or Chaucer or Einstein, you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen of a democracy.
I think it was La Rochefoucauld who said that most people would never fall in love if they hadn't read about it. He might have said that no one would ever manage to become human if they hadn't read about it.
I speak, I'm sure, for the faculty of the liberal arts college and for the faculties of the specialized schools as well, when I say that a university has no real existence and no real purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in touch, both as specialists and as humans, with those human minds your human mind needs to include.
The faculty, by its very existence, says implicitly: "We have been aided by many people, and by many books, in our attempt to make ourselves some sort of storehouse of human experience.
We are here to make available to you, as best we can, that expertise.
又一学年——为了什么？
约翰•查尔迪
让我给你们讲讲我在教学生涯中最早遇到的困难。那是1940年的一月，我刚从研究生院毕业，在密苏里大学堪萨斯分校开始我第一个学期的教学。一个瘦高的学生走进我的课堂，坐下，交叉着手，看着我，似乎在说“好吧，快教我些东西。
两周后我们开始学习《哈姆雷特》。三周后他踏进我的办公室，双手插着腰。“看”，他说，“我来这是学习当药剂师的。为什么我必须读这个？”他都没有带自己的书，而是指向放在我桌上的那本。
我是名新教师，本可以告诉这位有个性的学生许多事情。我本可以指出，他考入的不是一所药学院校，而是一所大学。意味着在他在毕业时，应该得到的是理学学士证书，而不是“合格药研工作者”的学位证书。
这证书会证明他专修过药剂学，也能进一步证明他曾学习过一些人类在历史长河所产生的思想。那就是说，他进入的不是一所专科，而是一所大学，既要进行培训也得接受教育。
我本可以告诉他这些，但很明显，他不会待太久，说了也没用。
尽管如此，我当时很年轻，有着强烈的责任感，我尝试这样和他说：“在你的余生中，”我说道，“每天平均是二十四小时。恋爱时，你会感觉不足；失恋时，你会觉得有余。但平均二十四小时是保持不变的。你会花八小时左右用来睡觉”。
“你会花八个小时左右在每个工作日中，我希望你能够做有效利用好它们。假设你毕业于一所药学学院—或工程、法律学院，或其他任何学校—在这八小时里你将运用你的专业技能。作为一名药剂师，你要确保氰化物没有和阿司匹林混在一起；作为一名工程师，你要确保一切在你的掌握之中”。
“作为一名律师，你要确保当事人没有因为你的无能而被处以电刑。这些都是有用的工作，有着人人尊重的技能，可以给你带来基本的满足。无论你还从事什么，这些技能很可能会是你养家糊口的本领。它们会给你带来收入，但愿它们总是够用”。
“但完成一天的工作后，那剩下的八小时你会做什么呢？假设你把它花在家庭上。你会建立什么样的家庭？孩子们会受到良好的家教吗？家庭氛围会开明民主吗？家里会有书籍吗？会有令人舒适的绘画吗？孩子们会享受到美妙的音乐吗”？
这差不多就是我所说的，但是这个讨厌鬼对此并不感兴趣。“看，”他说，“你们教授以你们的方式培养孩子，我也会用我自己的方式培养孩子。我呀，更愿花时间努力挣钱”。
“我希望你能挣很多，”我和他说，“因为你会在不开支票的时候，烦恼无事可做的”。
14年过去了，我仍在教书，在此我要告诉你，大学的职责不仅是在于培训你，它还要使你们接触人类思想的精髓。如果你没有时间阅读莎士比亚的作品，没有时间了解基本哲学，没有时间欣赏艺术的存续，没有时间学习我们称之为历史的人类发展的课程—那么你就会在大学碌碌无为。
你正在变为新型的机械野人，装有按钮的穴居人。我们的大学不可避免地塑造出了大量这样的生命形态，但是不能说他们上了大学；而是大学曾存在于他们的生活——没有留下任何痕迹。
没有外界的帮助，谁也不会成长为一个文明人。要想成为一个文明人，必须获取文明社会所需的知识和文化。而人生苦短，不足以获取人类历史长河中的所有宝贵财产。
比如说，你想成为一名物理学家。你经过麻省理工宏伟的石头大厅，那里的石头上刻着科学家名字。很可能你们当中没有人的名字会刻入其中。但只要你们上高中物理课时没有从头睡到尾，你们当中任何一个人所了解的物理知识远比许多历史上伟大的学者多。你知道的更多，是因为他们将他们知道的传给了你，是因为你可以从他们已了解的知识上起步。
人类科技发展是如此，人类精神财富的积累亦是如此。这些科技与精神的大部分资料都储存于书中。书籍是人类独有的成就。当你阅读一本书，你丰富了你的人生经历。阅读荷马作品，你的思想中会融入一部分荷马的思想。通过书籍你可以获得起码一些伟人的思想与经历，比如维吉尔、但丁、莎士比亚—无穷无尽。
因为一本好书就是一份礼物；它向你呈现你没有时间去亲自体验的生活，它带你进入你在现实生活中没有时间去亲自游览的世界。
从本质上说，一个文明人应该知道许多这样的生活与世界。如果你太过匆忙，或是对自己的无知洋洋得意，以至于不能把一些亚里士多德，乔叟或爱因斯坦的思想当作你的品质的一件礼物来接受，那么你既不是一个先进的人，也不是一个民主社会的有用公民。
我记得拉罗什富科说过，大多数人如果没有读过关于爱情方面的书，他们就不会恋爱；他可能还说过如果没有读过有关人类的书，就没有一个人能成为真正的人。
当我说到只有当大学使你们，无论作为专业人才还是普通人，接触到那些你们的头脑应该有的那些人类的思想，它才有存在的意义，才有真正的办学目的的时候，我确实是我在替文学院的教职员工，也在替专科的教职员工说话。
教职员工们的存在就暗示了这一点：在努力使我们自己成为某种人类经验的宝库过程中，我们得到了许多人的帮助，也得到了很多书籍的帮助。我们教师的任务就是尽最大努力使你们能够获得那些专门知识。