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  3. How to Fix the Rich World’s Failing High Schools? The weakest and most vulnerable element in education, particularly in the

How to Fix the Rich World’s Failing High Schools? The weakest and most vulnerable element in education, particularly in the

admin2013-07-02  30
问题                 How to Fix the Rich World’s Failing High Schools?
    The weakest and most vulnerable element in education, particularly in the developed world, is the education of adolescents in our secondary-school systems. Relative economic prosperity and the extension of leisure time have spawned(引起)an inconsistent but prevalent post-ponement of adulthood. On the one hand, as consumers and future citizens, young people between the ages of 13 and 18 are afforded considerable status and independence. Yet they remain infantilized in terms of their education, despite the earlier onset of maturation. Standards and expectations are too low. Modern democracies are increasingly inclined to ensure rates of close to 100 percent completion of a secondary school that can lead to university education. This has intensified an unresolved struggle between the demands of equity and the requirements of excellence. If we do not address these problems, the quality of university education will be at risk.

    To make secondary education meaningful, more intellectual demands of an adult nature should be placed on adolescents. They should be required to use primary materials of learning, not standardized textbooks; original work should be emphasized, not imitative, uniform assignments; and above all, students should undergo inspired teaching by experts. Curricula should be based on current problems and issues, not disciplines defined a century ago. Statistics and probability need to be brought to the forefront, given our need to assess risk and handle data. Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete. They were designed decades ago for large children, not today’s young adults.
    In much of the developed world, including the United States, England, Israel and Russia, math and science instruction remains dangerously inadequate. Some nations score well on tests that demand rote preparation, but as all research scientists understand, science isn’t about facts and memorization alone. It’s about innovation, which requires nurturing the scientific imagination at the onset of adulthood, well before higher education begins. And literacy in science is indispensable to an individual’s preparation for citizenship. The analysis of our most pressing political issues, from the environment to health care, depends on it.
    The situation is not much better when it comes to reading and writing. The skills of interpretation and close analysis of complex texts are not sufficiently cultivated in high school. Most adolescent students do far too little analytical writing, which results in passive learning: the ability to recognize and recall, but not generate ideas.
    Education is linked in the mind of the public with economic competitiveness. Quality and standards have become political issues. In the United States, the response has led politicians to turn to old forms of standardized testing as a nearly punitive, fear-inducing instrument of "objective measurement" to inspire public trust. But these tests are foolish. They are designed to drive an oversimplified and standardized curriculum. They do not diagnose what and why the student doesn’t know something. The transformation of testing into a useful tool for understanding success and failure in teaching so that classroom strategies and curricula can be improved is an important step in raising the standard of adolescent education.
    Yet the prospects for improving education in the United States are particularly bleak, even on the eve of the presidential election. Neither candidate has a persuasive platform on the subject because the tradition is for presidential hopefuls(有希望获得成功的人)to use education as a rhetorical issue while hiding behind the time-honored notion that its funding and administration is ultimately a local matter. In the United States most local school boards are as interested in high-school sports teams as in what is learned in the classroom. Education becomes a nostalgic relic of direct local democracy that leads to a rapid turnover in local school boards and therefore the tenure of superintendents. There is not enough stability in public-school leadership for effective reform to take place.
    In this sense, Europe and the rest of the world are ahead of America. Most advanced nations have a constructive national presence in educational policy in the setting of national standards for teachers and schools. For the United States to improve the education performance of its adolescents, it must make education a national priority in terms of funding and expectations, just like health care.
    The overriding(最主要的)concern in the United States is how to recruit better-trained teachers and reward them more adequately. A first step is to return a measure of autonomy to the classroom teacher. High-school teachers should be held to high standards in the same way as university professors, whose professional autonomy and responsibility for quality are managed together. School for the adolescent should be engaging and inspiring in a way that shows that securing power, success, and wealth are wholly contingent(视条件而定的)on knowledge and the use of the intellect.
    The university is characterized by a combination of more freedom and higher expectations than exist in secondary schools. Ironically, in secondary schools there is a demand for uniformity and regulation of behavior that results in less autonomy and the dumbing down of academic expectations. The young adult needs to experience the desire to know, and to recognize the intimate connection between knowledge and the conduct of life. Motivating a child is far easier than motivating an adolescent. Learning can inspire new goals. After all, in the future we will need fewer lawyers and managers, and more engineers, scientists and inventors.
    The most successful strategy for solving the problem of inadequate education for adolescents is the burgeoning(发展)early college movement in the United States. The quickest way to introduce university-type education at an earlier age is to provide incentives to universities to take over public secondary schools and assume responsibility for their curricula, staff, and management — in other words, to step in where direct state and local control has failed.
    Educational reform is akin to planting a fruit tree where the first harvest is many years off, well beyond the normal cycle of elections and political careers. Therefore, let us put politicians at bay. Education may not be a science, but we ought to give its practice proper respect: we don’t determine medical treatments by free elections, and we don’t permit patients to manage hospitals. The reason the university is essential to solving the problem of secondary schooling is because the public accepts that true scholarship and learning are legitimate areas of expertise for the university. The same assignment of control and responsibility needs to be ceded(割让)to teachers in the arena of secondary schooling.
    Education for citizenship and the development of civil virtue are best realized by placing the joy and obligation of a serious education onto individuals during the early years of adolescence. The overwhelming and deadening uniformity of mass culture, the thoughtless appropriation of language and opinions through instruments of mass communication, and the increasing inability to distinguish truth from fiction need to be counteracted(抵制). The most powerful instrument for counteracting these great dangers to freedom and its voluntary abandonment through elections in mass democracies is a rigorous college-level education that instills pride, ambition and confidence in young adults that can lead them to love, protect and exercise the freedom to dissent and think independently.
    Our current approach to the education of adolescents now does the exact opposite. It cultivates passivity, uniformity, imitation and the lowering of aspirations, even among those whom we deem gifted. At minimum, the economic well being of the United States is at risk if we fail to reform how we educate our young adults. What is really at stake, however, are freedom and individuality in a world defined by complexity and interdependency on a global scale — factors that dwarf the importance of liberty and each human life.
What leads to the prevalent postponement of adulthood?
选项 A、Adolescents are afforded considerable status and independence.
B、Young people begin to mature at an earlier period.
C、Standards and expectations of secondary education are too low.
D、The coverage rate of secondary education is too high.
答案C
解析 本段中间部分提到一方面青少年被赋予相当高的地位和独立性，但是在教育方面他们仍被当作幼儿对待，尽管他们提前进入了成熟期。对他们实行的标准和期望值都太低了。可知[C]项正确。[A][B]两项的内容应该是提早进入成年的原因，不是延迟成年的原因，故排除。本段后半部分说的是中学的毕业率近乎100％，这导致了学习质量上的忽视。选项中的覆盖率是对原文的误解，故排除[D]项。
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