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  3. Sometimes you have to travel very far to gain perspective on things in your own country. Recently, I taught a UNICEF-sponsored c

Sometimes you have to travel very far to gain perspective on things in your own country. Recently, I taught a UNICEF-sponsored c

admin2010-11-29  96
问题     Sometimes you have to travel very far to gain perspective on things in your own country. Recently, I taught a UNICEF-sponsored course in Malang, Indonesia, on educational innovation. My audience consisted of teachers, administrators, teacher trainers, and high-ranking officials from the Indonesian Ministry of Education. Unlike in the United States, the public school system in Indonesia, as in many other countries, is run by a centralized ministry. Not only does this government department develop the curriculum for schools, it also employs curriculum officers who write the textbooks for the curriculum areas. Thus, the powerful Indonesian Ministry of Education controls essentially all aspects of education in the country.
    During my presentation about schools that have sustained meaningful innovation in the United States, I noticed a rising buzz coming from the audience. The people’s expressions of concern and the emotion in their voices was clear, but it wasn’t until their questions were translated that I understood the reason for this agitation. Their comments went something like this: "Tell us, Steve, why your country is moving in the direction of more and more tests for your children? Our system has been doing that for years and we have decided to move to a freer, more creative process. We invite people like you to help us untangle ourselves from all of that testing and the centralized control that goes with it. What is going on in America anyway?"
    Maybe it was the heat of the equatorial climate; maybe it was my own temperature rising from anxiety. Whatever the source, I started to feel quite feverish, and it was at this point that the metaphor of the flu popped into my mind. I told my Indonesian colleagues that in the United States, we periodically fall victim to a kind of "educational flu." When we are overtaken in the international education arena (in the recent Programme for International Student Assessment, the United States ranked 15th out of 32 countries surveyed), our politicians and educational administrators get feverish. They start to manufacture lots of standardized tests and devise very severe consequences for students and teachers when test results do not meet expectations. Like a rising fever, these steps are a clear indication that we are coming down with our educational flu. Brilliant or not, this analogy was enough to get me through that difficult point in my lecture.
    The next day, things got worse. Again, like one falling victim to the flu, I began to feel out of step with the rest of the world. I picked up a regional newspaper and found that Thailand was also moving away from a hierarchical system and standardized tests and toward a more creative education program for children. When I came home, I read that a similar move is taking shape in China where inventiveness, not the traditional national test, is moving to center stage. Thus, I was confronted with a real paradox: Some of the Asian societies well known for rigid bureaucracies are looking for ways to break free, while my country, renowned for its creativity and supposedly child-centered approach to education, is busily sewing itself into a thick hide of conformity and control. Why are the different cultures moving in such opposite directions?
It can be inferred from the passage that______.
选项 A、The author did not know much about the schools in the U.S.
B、The author does not speak Indonesian.
C、The author likes the Indonesian school system.
D、The author teaches in universities only.
答案B
解析 推理题。从第一段可知作者是受联合国教科文组织邀请到印度尼西亚讲学的，内容正是美国教育，所以A说作者不了解美国的教育不对。C在文中没有提及。听作者讲课的人包括教师、行政人员、师资培训人员和高官等，可知并非只是大学课堂。第二段中提到作者虽然注意到听众有反应，但是直到问题被翻译过来，他才明白，可知作者不会讲印度尼西亚本地的语言，故选B。
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