| lacking a care for AIDS, society must
offer education, not only by public pronouncement but in classrooms. Those
with AIDS or those at high risk of AIDS suffer prejudice, they are feared by
some people who find living itself unsafe, while others conduct themselves with
a "bravado(冒险心理)"that could be fatal. AIDS has afflicted a society already short
on humbanism, open--handedness and optimism. Attempts to strike it out with the
offending microbe are not abetted(教唆)by pre--existing social ills. Such concerns
impelled me to offer the first university--level undergraduate AIDS course, with
its two important aims: To address the fact that AIDS is caused by a virus, not
by moral failure or social collapse. The proper response to AIDS is compassion
coupled with an understanding of the disease itself. We wanted to foster(help
the growth of) the idea of a humane society. To describe how AIDS tests the institutions upon which our society rests. The economy, the political system, science, the legal Establishment, the media and our moral ethical--philosophical attitudes must respond to the disease. Those responses, whispered, or shrieked, easily accepted or highly controversial, must be put in order if the nation is to manage AIDS. Scholars have suggested that how a society deals with the threat of AIDS describes the extent to which that society has the right to call itself civilized. AIDS, then, is woven into the tapestry(挂毯)of modern society; in the course of explaining that tapestry, a teacher realizes that AIDS may bring about changes of historic proportions. Democracy obliges its educational system to prepare students to become informed citizens, to join their voices to the public debate in spried by AIDS. Who shall direct just what resources of manpower and money to the problem of AIDS? Even more basic, who shall formulate a national policy on AIDS? The educational challenge, then, is to enlighten(启发)the individual and the social, or public , responses to AIDS. |