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Does a Good Education Really Matter?
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We went along to Wandsworth Job Centre and surveyed some people to find out how important they felt that a good school education was.
The results showed that many people were disappointed in their education. They put the blame sometimes on themselves. Many felt that their teachers were not good enough, that many of the textbooks were out-of-date, especially when it came to science, and that they should have had more or better careers advice. They also felt that they should have been made to work harder, either by the teachers or by their parents. But people seemed equally ready to put the blame on their own shoulders. Many felt that they had chosen the wrong subjects when they started to specialize, or that they had wasted time at school. Others felt that they had left school too early in their eagerness to get a job and earn money. A few even thought that their failure was due to the type of school they went to, and that they would have been better off somewhere else.
D. Project Work
1. Collect as much information as possible about college and university education in your country. Organize a discussion which will touch upon the following questions:
Is college and university very expensive in your country?
Which college/university degrees are most common?
What opportunities are there for college graduates?
Is it difficult for young people to find a job?
2. Choose a university you are interested in. Pick up information about it in encyclopaedias and other reference books as the basis for your discussion.
3. Collect information about different types of secondary schools in your country. Great Britain/the USA and compare it. In your group decide:
which type of school is the best one and explain why you have chosen it;
which types of schools you consider out-of-date and why;
what your idea of a perfect school is.
4. Plan the perfect "core" college curriculum using the following information:
The trustees of your university are very upset by recent studies that show that the average graduate from your school is less competent than the average graduate of 50 years ago. As a result, the trustees have insisted that the entire educational approach be changed. Instead of having students take only elective courses, they must take three years (144 units) of "core" courses. Only during their senior year may they take electives in their major.
According to the trustees, the core courses must be designed to "give the student a broad background in the general humanities and sciences with the result that the student possesses analytical skills and written and verbal ability necessary to be a leader in society."
Each course is four units. You may require a person to take more than four units (or no units) in the following subjects:
5. Study the following chart and make a chart of the Russian/ British System of Education. Consult the reference material.
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SUPPLEMENTARY READING
(by P.P. Dunne)
On Education
Mr Smith was worried. His little Bobbie was already six years old and it was time for the family to decide his career. It was difficult, however, to choose a suitable school for little Bobbie Smith. The boy was such a bright little chap. At last Mr Smith made up his mind to drop in* on Mr Brainer, his neighbour, and ask him for advice. Everybody in the neighbourhood believed Mr Brainer to be a very clever old gentleman.
"It's a serious question," Mr Brainer said, "and it seems to worry people more than it used to. Nowadays they start talking about the education of the child before they choose the name. It's like this: 'This kid talks in his sleep. He'll make a fine lawyer.' Or, 'Look at him fishing up in Uncle Tom's watch pocket. We must train him for a banker.' Or, 'I'm afraid he'll never be strong enough to work. He must go into the church.'
"To my mind, Smith, we are wasting too much time, thinking of the future of our young, and trying to teach them... what they ought not to know** till they are grown-up. We send the children to school as if it was a summer garden*** where they got to be amused instead of a reformatory**** where they are sent to be reformed. When I was a kid I was put at my ABC the first day I set foot in the school; and my head was sore inside and out***** before I went home. Nowadays things seem to be quite different. Now the first thing we teach the future businessmen and politicians of our nation is waltzing, singing and cutting pictures out of a book. In my opinion it would be much better to teach them toughness******, that's what they need in life."
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* to drop in on – to go to a person's house for a short visit
** what they ought not to know – чего они не должны знать
*** a summer garden – sort of kindergarten
**** a reformatory – исправительное заведение для малолетних преступников
***** my head was sore inside and out – у меня просто разламывалась голова
****** toughness – жесткость; упорство
The Kindergarten
"I know what will happen," Mr Brainer wenton to say. "You'll send Bobbie to what Germans call a Kindergarten. And it's a good thing for Germany, because all a German knows is what one tells him; and his graduation papers are a certificate that he needn't think any more. But we have introduced it into this country, and one day I dropped in on Mary Ellen and saw her Kindergarten. The children were sitting around on the floor and some were molding dogs out of mud and wiping their hands on their hair, and some were carving figures of a goat out of pasteboard, and some were singing, and some were sleeping and a few were dancing. And one boy was pulling another boy's hair.
'Why don't you punish the little savage, Mary Ellen?' said I.
'We don't believe in corporal punishment,'* said she. 'School should be pleasant for the children,' she said. 'The child whose hair is being pulled is learning patience, and the child that is pulling the hair is discovering the futility of human endeavour.'**
'Oh, well,' I said, 'that's very interesting, indeed. Times have certainly changed since I was a boy,' I said. 'Put them through their exercises,' I said, 'Tommy, spell "cat," I said.
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'Go to the devil,' said the little angel.
'Very smartly said***," said Mary Ellen. 'You should not ask him to spell,' she said. 'They don't learn that till they go to college,' she said, 'sometimes not even then,' she said.
'And what do they learn?' I said.
'Playing,' she said, 'and dancing, and independence of speech, and beauty songs, and sweet thoughts, and how to make home homelike,' she said.
'I won't put them through any exercise today,' I said.
'...whisper, Mary Ellen,' I said. 'Do you never feel like whipping them?'****
'The teachings of Freebull and Pitzotly***** are contrary to that,' she said. 'But I'm going to be married and leave school on Friday the 22nd of January and on Thursday the 21st I'm going to ask a few of the darlings to the house and stew them over a slow fire.'"******
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* corporal punishment – телесные наказания
** the futility of human endeavour – тщетность человеческих усилий
*** very smartly said – очень умный ответ
**** Do you never feel like whipping them? –И вам никогда не хочетсяотшлепать их?
***** искаженное от Froebel – немецкий педагог,основатель детскихсадов, Pestallozi – выдающийся швейцарский педагог
****** to stew over a slow fire – зажарить на медленном огне
College
"Well, after they have learned at school they are ready for college. Mamma packs a few things into her son's bag and the lad trots off to college. If he is not strong enough to look for high honours as a boxer he goes into the thought department.* The President** takes him to his study, gives him a cigarette and says: 'My dear boy, what special branch of learning would you like to study to become one of our professors? We have a Chair of Beauty and a Chair of Puns, a Chair of Poetry on the Setting Sun, and one on Platonic Love, and one on Sweet Thoughts and one on How Green Grows the Grass.*** This is all you will need to equip you for perfect life, unless you intend being a dentist; in which case,'**** he says, 'we won't think much of you but we have a good school where you can learn that disgraceful trade,' he says.
And the lad makes his choice, and every morning when he is up in time he takes a glass of whiskey and goes off to hear Professor Marianna tell him that if the data of human knowledge must be rejected as subjective, how much more must they be subjected as rejective..."*****
"I don't understand a word of what you are saying," said Mr Smith.
"Nor do I," said Mr Brainer. "But believe me it is as my father used to say: 'Children shouldn't be sent to school to learn but to learn how to learn. I don't care what you teach them, so long as it is unpleasant to them.' It's training they need, Smith. That's all. I never could make use of what I learned in college about trigonometry and grammar; and the bumps I got on my head from the schoolmaster's cane I have never been able to make use of either. But it was the being there and having to learn things by heart, without asking the meaning of them, and going to school cold and coming home hungry, that made the man of me you see before you. Our children must be taught toughness, that's what they need in life."
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* the thought department– (зд.) философский факультет
** the President – the Head of the College
*** Перечисляются вымышленные названия кафедр.
**** in which case– в таком случае
***** Дается сатирическая иллюстрация высокопарного псевдонаучного стиля философского факультета.
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie*
(by Muriel Spark)
The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.
The girls could not take off their panama hats because this was not far from the school gates and hatlessness was an offence. These girls formed the Brodie set.** That was what they had been called even before the headmistress had given them the name, when they had moved from the Junior to the Senior school at the age of twelve. At that time they had been immediately recognizable as Miss Brodie's pupils, being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorized curriculum, as the headmistress said, and useless to the school as a school. These girls were discovered to have heard of Mussolini, the Italian Renaissance painters; the interior decoration of the London house of the authorof"Winnie-the-Pooh" had been described to them, as had the love lives of Charlotte Bronte and of Miss Brodie herself. They were aware of the existence of Einstein and the arguments or those who considered the Bible to be untrue. They knew the rudiments of astrology but not the capital of Finland. All of the Brodie set, save one, counted on its fingers, as had Miss Brodie, with accurate results more or less.
By the time they were sixteen, and had reached the fourth form, they remained unmistakably Brodie, and were all famous in the school, which is to say they were held in suspicion and not much liking.*** They had no team spirit and very little in common with each other outside their continuing friendship with Jean Brodie. She still taught in the Junior department.
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* Мисс Джин Броди в расцвете сил и энергии.
** the Brodie set – окружение Мисс Броди
*** they were held in suspicion and not much liking – к ним относились с недоверием и недолюбливали
Miss Brodie never discussed her affairs with the other members of the staff, but only with those former pupils whom she had trained up to her confidence. There had been previous plots to remove her from Blaine, which had been foiled.
"It has been suggested again that I should apply for a post at one of the progressive schools, where my methods would be more suited to the system than they are at Blaine. But I shall not apply for a post at a crank school.* I shall remain at this education factory. Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life."
Often, that sunny autumn, when the weather permitted, the small girls took their lessons seated on three benches arranged about the elm.
"Hold up your books," said Miss Brodie quite often that autumn, "prop them up in your hands, in case of intruders.** If there are any intruders, we are doing our history lesson... our poetry... English grammar."
The small girls held up their books with their eyes not on them, but on Miss Brodie.
"Meantime I will tell you about my last summer holiday in Egypt... I will tell you about care of the skin, and of the hands... about the Frenchman I met in the train to Biarritz... and I must tell you about the Italian paintings I saw. Who is the greatest Italian painter?"
"Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie."
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"That is incorrect. The answer is Giotto, he is my favourite."
"If anyone comes along," said Miss Brodie, "in the course of the following lesson, remember that it is the hour for English grammar. Meantime I will tell you a little of my life when I was younger than I am now, though six years older than the man himself."
"I was engaged to a young man at the beginning of the War but he fell on Flanders' Field," said Miss Brodie. "He fell like an autumn leaf though he was only twenty-two years of age. When we go indoors we shall look on the map at Flanders, and the spot where my lover was laid before you were born. He was poor. He came from Ayrshire, a countryman, but a hard-working and clever scholar. He said, when he asked me to marry him, 'We shall have to drink water and walk slow'! That was Hugh's country way of expressing that we would live quietly. We shall drink water and walk slow. What does the saying signify. Rose?"
"That you would live quietly. Miss Brodie," said Rose Stanley who six years later had a great reputation for sex.
The story of Miss Brodie's felled fiance was well on its way when the headmistress, Miss Mackay, was seen to approach across the lawn. Rose Stanley had now begun to weep.
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* a crank school – школа с причудами (речь идет о современных школах)
** in caseof intruders– если кто-нибудь придет
"What are you little girls crying for?" asked Miss Mackay.
"They are moved by a story I have been telling them. We are having a history lesson," said Miss Brodie, catching a falling leaf in her hand as she spoke.
"Crying over a story at ten years of age!" said Miss Mackay to the girls. "I am only come to see you and I must be off. Well, girls, the new term has begun. I hope you all had a splendid summer holiday and I'd like to see your essays on how you spent them. You shouldn't be crying over history at the age often. My word!"
"You did well," said Miss Brodie to the class, when Miss Mackay 'had gone, "not to answer the question put to you. It is well, when in difficulties, to say never of word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden."
Assignments:
1. Give the Russian proverb corresponding to the English one given at the end of the extract.
2. Give the character sketch of Miss Brodie.
In One Ear and Upside Down*
(by Parke dimming)
The instructions and commands given by parents are endless in variety. Therefore it is impossible to make a list of them. Neither can you foretell exactly how they will be misinterpreted.
Yet, as a help to inexperienced parents I shall be happy to supply them with a short list of mixed-up instructions. They are sure to find it very helpful.
1. Instruction: "Clean up properly before you come to table. And don't use those guest towels!"
Result: The child goes and wipes its hands on a guest towel.
2. Instruction: "Will you kindly turn that radio down lower?"
Result: Usually none. After the words are repeated several times the child may turn off the radio and turn on the television.
3. Instruction: "Bring me the duster, please. I want to remove the dust from the piano."
Result: The child walks out of the room and returns in some time either with the vacuum cleaner or with a pail of water.
4. Instruction: "Clear the things off the dining room table and then get down to your homework so that you can finish it in time. I'll do the dishes."**
Result: The youngster clears the table after the request is repeated twice. Then he starts to do the dishes. He is greatly surprised when Mother tells him to start studying. He begins to complain that Mother is always telling him one thing and then changing her mind.
5. Instruction: "There is going to be trouble if you go on leaving the front door open every time you go in and out of the house."
Result: The child obviously alarmed quickly goes to the door and opens it.
6. Instruction: "Don't forget you have a dentist's appointment at three o'clock on the fourth."
Result: After reading the preceding examples, the reader is expected to figure this out for himself.*
I suppose there is no need to go on with list. A smart parent will now see a way out. As the child's natural tendency is to get a request mixed up, you simply first mix it up yourself.
For instance the other morning we wanted John to wash his neck, but we hesitated a long time before we finally worded the command. It was as follows: "Scrub the soap with a towelandthen hang up your neck."**
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Result: The cleanest neck we have seen in six months. You see how simple it is if you know how to do it.
Assignments:
1. Think of a continuation to this sketch.
2. Tell a funny story about your little brother or sister, or your own child.
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* Обыгрывается поговорка "In one ear and out of the other."
** to do the dishes – мыть посуду
*** The mixed up instruction for: "Scrub your neck with the soap and then hang up your towel."
**** at least so far as children are concerned –по крайней мере,чтокасается детей
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