【正文】 ts and teachers are experiencing is the recognition that the more plex structures one encounters in a language are not as vital to making oneself understood and so have a less immediate field of application. For the same reason, from the teacher39。.. . . ..大學(xué)英語精讀第5冊和第6冊全文課文翻譯A Kind of SermonIt is probably easier for teachers than for students to appreciate the reasons why learning English seems to bee increasingly difficult once the basic structures and patterns of the language have been understood. Students are naturally surprised and disappointed to discover that a process which ought to bee simpler does not appear to do so. It may not seem much consolation to point out that the teacher, too, bees frustrated when his efforts appear to produce less obvious results. He finds that students who were easy to teach, because they succeeded in putting everything they had been taught into practice, hesitate when confronted with the vast untouched area of English vocabulary and usage which falls outside the scope of basic textbooks. He sees them struggling because the language they thought they knew now appears to consist of a bewildering variety of idioms, clich233。s point of view, selecting what should be taught bees a more difficult task. It is much easier to get food of any kind than to choose the dish you would most like to eat on a given day from a vast menu. Defining the problem is easier than providing the solution. One can suggest that students should spend two or three years in an Englishspeaking country, which amounts to washing one39。 read the English written today, not 200 years ago。s still your duty to choose the best path to follow near the top of the mountain just as it was to propose a practicable shortcut away from the beaten track in the foothills. And if the path you choose is too overgrown to make further progress, the whole party will have to go back and you will have to choose another route. You are still the paid guide and expert and there is a way to the top somewhere.The Fifth Freedom More than three centuries ago a handful of pioneers crossed the ocean t Jamestown and Plymouth in search of freedoms they were unable to find in their own countries, the freedoms of we still cherish today: freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. Today the descendants of the early settlers, and those who have joined them since, are fighting to protect these freedoms at home and throughout the world. And yet there is a fifth freedom basic to those four that we are in danger of losing: the freedom to be one39。s youth? I believe it has started slipping away from us because of three misunderstandings. First, the misunderstanding of the meaning of democracy. The principal of a great Philadelphia high school is driven to cry for help in bating the notion that it is undemocratic to run a special program of studies for outstanding boys and girls. Again, when a good independent school in Memphis recently closed, some thoughtful citizens urged that it be taken over by the public school system and used for boys and girls of high ability, what it have entrance requirements and give an advanced program of studies to superior students who were interested and able to take it. The proposal was rejected because it was undemocratic! Thus, courses are geared to the middle of the class. The good student is unchallenged, bored. The loafer receives his passing grade. And the lack of an outstanding course for the outstanding student, the lack of a standard which a boy or girl must meet, passes for democracy. The second misunderstanding concerns what makes for happiness. The aims of our presentday culture are avowedly ease and material wellbeing: shorter hours。est tout pardoner (To understand everything is to excuse everything). Do we really believe that our softening standards bring happiness? Is it our sound and considered judgment that the tougher subjects of the classics and mathematics should be thrown aside, as suggested by some educators, for dollplaying? Small wonder that Charles Malik, Lebanese delegate at the ., writes: There is in the West (in the United States) a general weakening of moral fiber. (Our) leadership does not seem to be adequate to the unprecedented challenges of the age. The last misunderstanding is in the area of values. Here are some of the most influential tenets of teacher education over the past fifty years: there is no eternal truth。 and realism demands a standard which either must be met or result in failure. These are hard words, but they are brutally true. If we deprive our children of the right to fail we deprive them of their knowledge of the world as it is. Finally, we can expose our children to the best values we have found. By relating our lives to the evidences of the ages, by judging our philosophy in the light of values that history has proven truest, perhaps we shall be able to produce that ringing message, full of content and truth, satisfying the mind, appealing to the heart, firing the will, a message on which one can stake his whole life. This is the message that could mean joy and strength and leadership freedom as opposed to serfdom.Your Key to a Better LifeThe most important psychological of this century is the discovery of the selfimage. Whether we realize it or not, each of us carries about with us a mental blueprint or picture of ourselves. It may be vague and illdefined to our conscious gaze. In fact, it may not be consciously recognizable at all. But it is there, plete down to the last detail. This selfimage is our own conception of the sort of person I am. It has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves. But most of these beliefs about ourselves have unconsciously been formed our past experiences, our successes and failures, our humiliations, our triumph