上学真的有用吗？

John Taylor Gatto的英文原文在这：http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

由于引起了我的强烈共鸣，于是尝试着在网上找的中文译文的基础上做些修改和自我解读。希望能给到有相同想法的人一些启发。Thanks♪(･ω･)ﾉ

原作者：【美】约翰·泰勒·盖托（1935— ），在曼哈顿当了30年老师，曾于1991年当选纽约州年度教师。同年，他在《华尔街日报》上公开发表了辞职信，从此不倦地为推进学校改革而奔赴各地演说，行程长达三百多万英里。

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

我在曼哈顿教了30年书，好学校、差学校都待过。在漫长的教师生涯里，我谙熟了厌烦的滋味。周遭世界中充斥着索然无趣。如果你问孩子们（我就经常问他们）：究竟是什么使他们感到厌烦？回答总是一样。他们说，学习很愚蠢，毫无意义；教的东西他们早就知道。他们说他们想干点儿实在事，而不是总坐在那儿。他们还说，老师似乎并不太清楚自己教的东西；很明显，他们也不想去做更多的了解。孩子们是对的，老师跟学生一样，也感到厌烦。

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame? 事实是，厌烦在学校老师中普遍存在。在老师的办公桌前待过一阵子的人，都肯定会感到疲乏无力、牢骚满腹、无精打采。若问他们为什么会感到厌烦，老师似乎要归罪于学生。面对粗鲁的、只对分数感兴趣的学生，怎么可能不厌烦？何况，老师们也是这种12年义务教育的产品，这个制度给学生的厌烦无以复加，教师作为体制内的人，受到的限制比学生更多。这一切究竟是谁之过？

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

对此我们都有责任，在这方面，我的祖父曾经指点过我。7岁时，有天下午，我对祖父抱怨说我觉得烦。他当即扇了我脑勺一巴掌，说，再也不许当他的面说烦——我烦是我的错，与旁人无关。使自己高兴、学习，是我无可推卸的责任，不懂得这一点的人都是长不大的小孩子，离他们远一点，因为他们不可信任。这一巴掌根治了我的厌烦。年复一年，在各个地方，我向一些了不起的学生传授了这个真理。为此，我常常破坏规矩，歪曲法律，让孩子们能够打破厌烦，不被它捕获。

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

“帝国”当然有所反击，要知道，孩子气的成年人常常把对立和忠诚搅在一起。病假之后回来，我发现所有准假的证据都被故意销毁。我被解职，甚至教师执照也被吊销，苦苦奋争了9个月，最后，一位学校秘书终于出来作证，证明这是一场阴谋。其间，我的家庭所受的牵累和磨难恕不一一赘述。我于1991年离职时，有了更多的理由去怀疑学校：它以漫长的学期、囚室风格的教室将学生和教师禁锢起来，如同一座虚拟的生产幼稚和无知的工厂。可是我实在不明白，为什么事情非如此不可。如果我们想做，我们就能轻而易举地抛弃老旧、愚蠢的体制，帮助孩子们受到教育，而非仅仅上学——这是我从自己的经验里得出的体会，许许多多的老师也有此心得，但因为害怕报复而保持沉默。我们只要稍微变通，不那么恪守时间、课本、考试的约束，而把孩子交给真正有能力的成年人，给每个学生他们所需要的自主权，让他们时时能够冒险，年轻人所具备的最好品质——好奇、冒险、坚韧、敏锐的洞察力，才能得到充分的鼓励和发扬。

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

但是，我们没有那样做。我越问为什么，像工程师一样追究这个问题，我就越感到困惑。假如学校并不存在问题，假如学校理应如此公然违背常识、违背漫长的教育经验，而不惜代价，一意孤行？小布什说：“一个也不能落下。”这句话，也许偶然道出了真相？他或许是指，我们的学校要保证每一个孩子都不能长成大人？

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

我们真的需要学校吗？不是指教育，而是指强制上学：6节课一天，一周5天，一年9个月，12年。这个死规矩是否真有必要？如果真有必要，原因何在？不要以阅读、写作、算术来搪塞，因为两百万家庭学校的学生对这种老生常谈早已置之不理。如果这还不算数，有一大批美国名人，从来没有像我们的孩子这样，受过12年一贯制学校的修理，仍然出类拔萃，独领风骚。乔治·华盛顿、本杰明·富兰克林、托马斯·杰斐逊、亚伯拉罕·林肯？没错，的确有人教过他们，可他们绝不是学校制度的产品，其中没有一个人曾经中学毕业。在大部分美国史中，孩子一般不上中学，可是没上过学的人成为海军上将，如法拉格特；成为发明家，如爱迪生；成为工业巨擘，如卡内基和洛克菲勒；成为作家，如梅尔维尔、马克·吐温、康拉德；甚至成为学者，如玛格丽特·米德。其实，稍早一些，年满13岁的人还被视为成人。阿里尔·杜兰特与其夫威尔共同撰写了精彩的历史巨著，多卷本的世界史。虽然她结婚时只有15岁，可又有谁会认为她缺乏教养？不上学恐怕并不意味着没教养。

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

在美国，我们被告知“成功”与“上学”同义，或至少有赖于后者。但是从历史上看，并非如此，不论这成功是以知识还是以金钱来度量。今天，世界各地都有人想方设法完成自我教育，而不进中学，这种中学常常等同于监狱。那么，为什么美国人总把教育与学校制度混为一谈？公立学校的目的究竟是什么？

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: 1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best.

直到1905年至1915年间，大规模教育的强制性才在美国扎根。尽管这一概念的产生要早得多，并且，它的推行贯穿了19世纪。这一巨变深远地影响了家庭生活和文化传统，其产生的原因有三：

1.为了培养好人； 2.为了培养好公民； 3.为了使每个人最大地发挥作用。

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.

这些目标现在仍然存在，大多数人都或多或少接受了，并视之为公立教育的崇高使命，尽管学校的现实与之相距甚远。但是，我们大错特错。加重这种错误认识的是大量的美国文学，其中对义务教育使命的陈述与前者惊人地相似。门肯【（1880—1956），20世纪20年代美国知识界的一位中心人物，新闻记者、评论家和语言学家】在1924年4月号的《美国信使》杂志上，发表了对教育的见解。他声言：

……要把知识灌输给年轻一辈，或者启迪他们的智慧（作为教育的目标），……这实属谬误。它只会把每个人都降低到同一平庸的水平，培养和训练出一群整齐划一的民众，消除异见和创造性。这才是美国政府要达到的目标……也是其他各处政府的目标。

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

因为门肯是著名的社会批评家，我们可能会对这段议论置之不理，把它当作极端的讽刺。虽然如此，他的文章确实追根寻源，追溯到当代教育制度的雏形：普鲁士军事帝国。这个国家现已消失，但是永远不应当被遗忘。美国刚刚跟德国打过仗，便继承了普鲁士的文化和思想。门肯当然意识到其中的讽刺意味，在讨论这个问题时是十分严肃的。我们的教育制度的确起源于普鲁士，这实在引起人的忧虑。

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German- speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace "manageable."

如果你心里有数，就会一次又一次地遇到学校起源于普鲁士这个奇特的说法。威廉·詹姆斯【（1842—1910），美国哲学家与心理学家】多次提到这一点。早在19世纪40年代，克里斯托弗·拉希在其所著《真正唯一的天堂》中，借主人公奥雷斯蒂斯·布朗森之口，公开谴责美国学校的普鲁士化。1843年，霍勒斯·曼恩【（1796—1859），美国教育家，现代公立学校教育体系的发起人】向马萨诸塞州教育理事会做了《第七个年度报告》，这是向腓特烈大帝献上的一首颂歌，呼吁把普鲁士的学校制度带进美国。如果联想到早期的乌托邦政治，就不会对普鲁士文化在美国大行其道感到意外。在美国独立战争的年代，一位普鲁士人曾任华盛顿的助手；到了1795年，大批说德语的人定居在美国，人数如此之众，以至国会考虑出版一个德语版的《联邦法》。让人最为吃惊的是，美国人对普鲁士文化中最糟糕的部分竟如此热衷。这个精心设计的教育制度，动机在于生产平庸的心智、阻碍内在的精神生活、剥夺学生重要的领导才能、确保得到顺从而不健全的民众。以上种种都是为了培养“好控制”的民众。

It was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century - that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

科南特担任哈佛校长20年之久，同时也是“一战”时的毒气专家、“二战”时的原子弹项目负责人、“二战”后德国美国辖区的高级专员，的确是20世纪最有影响的人物之一。正是从他，我第一次觉察出美国学校教育的目的。没有科南特，我们就不可能享有现在这种标准测验的形式和级别，也不可能拥有像著名的科隆比纳高中那样能容纳2000到4000学生的庞大中学。离开教职后不久，我读了科南特在1959年写的论文。这篇文章长得像一本书，题为“孩子、父母和国家”。我饶有兴趣地发现，他把我们现在的学校视作1905至1930年间一场革命的结果。一场革命？他没有做过多的阐述，但是，他的确将我这个好奇而无知的读者引到亚历山大·英格利斯的一本书面前，这本书写于1918年，书名是《中学教育原理》。作者在书中写道，自己“作为革命家亲眼目睹了这场革命”。

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.

哈佛的一个教育课程以英格利斯的名字命名。英格利斯说得很明白，美洲大陆义务教育的目的与普鲁士当年是一致的。19世纪20年代的欧洲，民主运动蓬勃兴起，农民和无产者要争取谈判的权力。普鲁士的学校的目的正在于渗透和破坏这一民主运动。现代的、工业化的义务教育要对下层阶级团结一致的运动动一动手术。学校用科目、年龄、不断的排名考试，以及名目繁多的细节把儿童分隔开。一旦无知的人类自小就被分离，那他们也不大可能会再度团结一致，形成可怕的威胁。

英格利斯将现代学校的作用（实际作用）归纳总结，认为学校有六种基本功能。那些天真地相信了这些目标的人们看到英格利斯的分类，会吓得毛骨悚然：

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

1.修正或调节的作用。学校应当建立固定的、反射性的服从权威的习惯，这需要完全摒除批判性的判断。有人主张学校应教授有趣、有用的内容，这当然不予采纳。因为,只有让学生学做无聊、愚蠢的事情，才能检验出学生是否具有条件反射式的服从。 2．整合的作用。或许也可称为协同的作用，因为它的目的在于尽量使儿童彼此相像。协同一致的人是可以预期的，因而容易控制。对于那些想要驾驭和操纵劳动力大军的人来说，这是求之不得的。 3．分析和指导的作用。学校意味着测定学生的社会角色,通过统计数字及事件记录就可以达到这个目的。就像你的永久记录，是的，你确实拥有这样的记录。 4．分拣的作用。一旦社会角色被分析出来，孩子们就被分类，按照他们对社会机器的价值而加以训练。所谓“发挥个人的最大作用”，仅止于此。 5．选拔的作用。这与人的选择无关，而是达尔文式的自然选择，所谓的物竞天择。总之，这意味着有意识地改良物种。学校会给不合竞争的品种贴上标签：低分、补习班，以及其他种种处罚。这些足以使同龄人对他们另眼相看、视之为劣等，有效地将他们逐出牌局。所有种种小羞辱自一年级起就开始实行，它的目的在于：将泥沙冲入下水道。 6．预备教育的作用。以种种规则限制的社会体系需要一个精英管理集团，为了达到这个目的，只有一小部分儿童被悄悄地传授以如何管理这个社会的知识，学习如何监视、控制一群被故意愚化的、拔去爪牙的民众。如此这般，政府便不会遇到挑战，而公司永不缺乏听话的劳动力。

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

不幸的是，这就是美国强制性公共教育的功能。不要以为英格利斯危言耸听，是个怪人，教育界持有这种观点的绝非他一人。科南特本人提倡以霍勒斯·曼恩及其他人的论点为基础，不遗余力地向美国鼓吹这种学校制度。乔治·皮博迪【（1795—1869），银行家，摩根财团创始人】资助了整个美国南方的义务教育运动。皮博迪这样的人深谙普鲁士的体系，这个体系不但有益于生成一个全然无害的选民群体、一支听话的劳动大军，而且还能促生一群浑浑噩噩的消费大众。在当时，一群企业巨头认识到，公共教育培养和驯化的作用会给他们带来巨大的财富。这群人当中就有安德鲁·卡内基和约翰·D·洛克菲勒。

There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

这下你终于明白了。不需要卡尔·马克思的阶级斗争学说，我们也能看出，愚化大众、挫败他们、把他们一个一个地孤立起来、弃掉那些不听话的人，这些全部对管理、经济或政治有利。而阶级的概念可能会突出这个命题，正如1909年，伍德罗·威尔逊【（1856—1924），美国第28任总统】任普林斯顿校长时对纽约教师协会的讲话：“我们应当让一个阶级接受自由的教育，让另一个阶级——这个阶级要大得多——如果必要，放弃接受自由教育的权利，以使自身适于完成特定的、艰苦的体力劳动。”但是做出这一令人恶心的决定的背后动机并不是阶级的考虑。这一策略的制定，完全是出于恐惧，或者现在为人熟悉的“效率”，这个至高无上的目的，而非爱、自由、欢笑和希望。总而言之，它起因于纯粹的贪婪。

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

要攫取的财富是巨大的。毕竟，现有的经济制度是以大规模生产为基础，以大公司的利益而非小企业或小业主的利益为导向的。大规模生产就需要大规模消费，但是进入20世纪，大多数美国人民都已经看出：买自己并不需要的东西是不自然、不明智的。就这一点而言，强制性的义务教育乃天赐良机。学校不必直接教孩子去无休止地消费，因为它有更好的办法：它鼓励孩子们完全不去思考。这就使他们在面对另一个现代社会的伟大发明——“营销”时，束手就擒。

Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

你无须研究也能明白，那些总能被说服而过度消费的人可以分成两组，消费成瘾者和儿童。学校非常成功地把我们的孩子变成了瘾君子，并更加成功地使我们的孩子更加孩子气。这并非事出偶然。从柏拉图到罗素、到我们的英格利斯，所有的教育理论家都清楚，如果将孩子混入一群，不给他们责任，不给他们独立，只能促成他们的贪婪、羡慕、嫉妒和恐惧，虽然年岁渐长，却永远不会长大。克伯雷于1934年写了著名的《美国的公共教育》一书，在书中，作者详尽描述并赞扬了美国学校的扩张，将童年延长2到6年，而强制教育在那时刚刚兴起。这位克伯雷，既是斯坦福教育学院的院长，也是哈佛校长科南特的朋友，曾在霍顿·米夫林出版公司与英格利斯共事过，前者负责小学部分的教材，后者负责中学部分。克伯雷在1922年版的《公立学校管理》中写道：“我们的学校是……对原料（儿童）进行加工的工厂，它将材料打磨成型……学校的任务是按照定下的产品规格塑造学生。”

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

在当今社会，可以相当清楚地看到这些“规格”是什么，成熟已经从人类生活的方方面面被去除。方便的离婚法让人不必为维持关系而付出努力，方便的借记卡让人不再对自己的财务做什么自律，方便的娱乐让人不必再学习如何愉悦自己，容易的答案让人提不出什么问题。这里已经成为一个儿童的国度，我们乐于放弃自己的判断、意志，听从政客的说服、商人的哄骗，而这些对真正的成年人来说是纯粹的侮辱。我们先买来电视，然后再买电视里的东西。我们买来电脑，再去买从电脑里看见的东西。我们买150美元一双的运动鞋，不管自己是否真正需要。鞋坏得很快，我们就再买一双。我们买SUV越野车，相信了它像人寿保险一样重要的哄骗，即使我们开车的时候心情乱七八糟。最要命的是，当白宫发言人阿里·弗莱舍对你说“说话要小心”时，你毫不怀疑，连眼皮都不眨一下，尽管你早就在学校里听说美国是一片自由的土地。我们上了所有的当，这是我们上学的结果。

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-upmaterial, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

现在讲一讲事情好的一面。一旦你了解到现代教育的逻辑，就能很容易避开它设下的陷阱和机关——学校把孩子训练成雇员和消费者，你就应当把你的孩子教成首领和探险家。学校训练孩子服从，你就应当教自己的孩子批判和独立的思考。学校的学生很容易厌烦，你要教你的孩子培养内在的精神生活，永远不会厌烦。你应当要求他们读严肃作品、成人的作品，涉猎历史、文学、哲学、音乐、美术、神学，所有这些话题学校教师肯定会回避。用孤独挑战你的孩子，让他们乐于与自己为伴，与内心对话。上学的人害怕孤单，他们总是需要没完没了的电视、上网、打手机，以及那些浅浅的、来得快去得快的友谊给他们做伴。你的孩子应当过更有意义的生活，他们能做到。

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

当然，我们首先应当知道我们的学校究竟是什么：一个拿年轻的心田做实验的实验室，为了社会需要训练习惯和态度的场所。强制性的义务教育偶尔也对学生有好作用，但是它的主要目的是将儿童变成臣仆。不要延长你孩子的童年，一天也不要延长。戴维·法拉格特不到13岁就能驾驶一艘俘获的英国军舰；爱迪生12岁就能印出一份快报；本杰明·富兰克林在同样的年纪能当印刷学徒（并且在同时学习一系列课程，其内容会难倒当今哈佛的高年级学生）。如果确有其事，那么，就不要限制你的孩子，不必告诉他什么该做、什么不该做。活了这么久，在教师战壕里的30年经验告诉我，天才多得像尘土，到处都是。我们之所以压制天才，是因为我们不能面对有天分的少男少女，我们不知道拿他们如何是好。我想，解决的办法很简单，也很了不起：让他们自己管理自己。