翻译题
One of the hallmarks of our anxieties about the future is confusion over how to prepare young people for it. What is it that we are supposed to be educating students for? 46 We know that today's young people will, during their lifetimes, face multiple changes in jobs, and we assume that their future will be shaped by technologies that we cannot yet imagine. But when we try to translate these observations into what elementary and secondary schools should be doing, the result is usually a rehash of tired old complaints. If we are ever to break out of this cycle, we are going to need some very big ideas. Egan, a professor of education at Simon Fraser University, recognizes the temptation to place blame for schools' failures on incompetent teachers and simple-minded politicians, but he wants a deeper and more useful explanation. 47 The key to obtaining such an explanation lies in addressing the problematic yet unchallenged assumptions that trap today's debate in an endless cycle of frustration. Drawing on evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, Egan outlines three widely accepted schools of thought about the goals of education. The first takes education to be a matter of socializing humans into the membership of nations and other collectives. 48 'Governments are in the business of schooling' for this reason, but socialization is pursued at a cost because 'making requirements uniform will always be at odds with the ambitions of our imaginations.' Indeed, if the goal of socialization is pursued too assiduously, we call it indoctrination-at least when others do it. With the emergence of literacy in human history came a second big goal for education: Plato's academic ideal. 49 Mastering the new forms of coded knowledge that came with literacy has become the purpose of much of contempoary education and, for better or for worse, underlies much of the testing that now shapes it. The third is the 'developmental' idea, through which education is viewed as 'supporting the fullest achievement of the natural process of mental development.' Like the blind men who encounter an elephant, these ideas bring limited perspectives to the discussion. Worse yet, they bring views that often stand in direct contradiction to one another. 50 As he puts it: 'There is no mind in the brain until the brain interacts with the external symbolic stone of culture, ' and in such interaction, the possibilities for innovation live as well.