【正文】 s from home as a child, is likely to be forever.在我多年實地考察的工作生涯中。現(xiàn)在葡萄牙仍然像是望臺。400年來，那里的漁民們駕著他們不堪一擊的小船穿越變化莫測的大西洋去淺水漁場。然而即使是一艘打魚船出海，它都有可能撞上危險的暗礁而使人溺水身亡，因此最短的航行都可能意味著永別。在我到達薩摩亞群島的當天，人們就開始問我：“你何時離開？”當我告訴他們：“一年后”，他們就會嘆息道：“唉，talofai”，（意思是送上我們的愛），聲音帶著似乎告別無數(shù)次才會有的悲傷。正是這種感覺一直困擾著南太平洋島上的人們。1Home, I learned, can be anywhere you make it. Home is also the place to which you e back again and again. The really poignant parting is the parting that may be forever. It is this sense that every sailing may be a point of no return that haunts the peoples of the Pacific islands. On the very day I arrived in Samoa, people began to ask, “When will you leave?” When I replied, “In a year,” they sighed, “Alas, talofai” — our love to you — with the sadness of a thousand partings in their voices. 我領(lǐng)悟到一點：家可以是在任何地方，家也是你一次次回來的地方。他們僅僅是在沙漠中挖出一塊小空間，然后把一棵小樹彎曲起來做成拱形當作入口。就比如我的一個朋友——她的母親是一位經(jīng)過專門訓練的護，寡居但是需要經(jīng)常搬家——一個小小的藍色花瓶對她的含義就是家。他們中有多少人能記得并說出他們母親梳妝臺上的東西，又有多少人能描繪孩提時所擁有的每一個玩具和每一本書呢？1It has been found that when desperate, unhappy youngsters are preparing to break away from a disordered, drugridden mune in which they have been living for months, they first gather together in one spot their few possessions and introduce a semblance of order among them. The need to define who you are by the place in which you live remains intact, even when that place is defined by a single object, like the small blue vase that used to mean home to one of my friends, the daughter of a widowed trained nurse who continually moved from one place to another. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert often build no walls when they camp in the desert. They simply hollow out a small space in the sand. But then they bend a slender sapling into an arch to make a doorway, an entrance to a dwelling as sacrosanct from invasion as the walled estates of the wealthy are or as Makati, in Manila, is, where watchmen guard the rich against the poor.人們已經(jīng)發(fā)現(xiàn)，當絕望的不幸少年打算擺脫他們曾經(jīng)生活過數(shù)月的毫無秩序、充斥著毒品的社區(qū)時，他們通常會先把他們有限的財產(chǎn)聚集到某個地方并按順序擺放起來。這些年輕人正在反抗著控制他們的專治。1The difficulty, it seems to me, is not — as so many older people claim— that in the past life was simple and there were fewer things, and so people were somehow better, as well as more frugal. It is, rather, that today’s children have to find new ways of anchoring the changing moments of their lives, and they have to try to do this with very little help from their elders, who grew up in an extraordinarily different world. How many of the young people who are rebelling against the tyranny of things, who want to strip their lives down to contents of a rucksack, can remember and name the things that lay on their mother’s dress table or can describe every toy and book they had as a child?我認為問題的癥結(jié)并不是許多年紀大的人所認為的那樣：認為過去生活很簡單，物質(zhì)也不夠豐富，所以人們反而生活得比現(xiàn)在更好更簡樸。和他們比起來，童年時對我有意義的東西加在一起也沒有幾件。所有這些對我都深有含義，每件東西都曾經(jīng)并且仍然能夠勾起我串串回憶。1There were treasures on Mother’s dressing table, too — a Wedgwood pin dish, a little porcelain Mary and her lamb, the pale green, flowered top of a rose bowl that had broken, and Mother’s silverbacked b and brush and mirror. All these things held meaning for me. Each was — and still is — capable of evoking a rush of memories.母親的梳妝臺上擺放著一些珍藏的物品—一個韋奇伍德的放別針的小碟，一個小小的“瑪麗和她的小綿羊”的瓷器制品。但在費城卻什么也沒有，只有高高矮矮的石頭墻，上面可以走路，其它什么都沒有了。鄰居的意大利小孩會采摘藍莓的果實再賣給我們。這樣，我們一年要搬4次家，因為秋天和春天我們會搬回到哈蒙頓的家。也不必在城里過夜。Every winter we went to live in or near Philadelphia so that Father would not have to travel too far or stay in the city on the nights that he lectured at the University. From the time I was seven years old, we went somewhere for the summer, too. So we moved four times a year, because for the fall and spring we returned to the house in Hammonton.每年冬天我們都會去費城或附近居住。它是擺脫日常單調(diào)生活的一種手段，是經(jīng)過數(shù)月乏味的生活之后一個人應該開始享有的度假生活。 it is an antidote to the humdrum activities of everyday life, a prelude to a holiday one is entitled to enjoy after months of dullness. Moving means breaking up a home, sadly or joyfully breaking with the past。畢竟，學生在能夠從聽講課中學到知識之前必須先學會去聽。那時他們最需要密切是甚至是針對個體的輔導。一是因為講課似乎從經(jīng)濟角度考慮是必需的，二是講課起源于悠久的傳統(tǒng)，而且人們又把傳統(tǒng)本身看得很重。但是，這也使得學生為他們自己 的學術(shù)成長分擔責任。這種形式的課程考試要求學生分析和綜合，而不是空洞的記憶。他們聽的技巧在與老師和同學的學術(shù)交流所帶來的刺激中大大得到提高。Smaller classes in which students are required to involve themselves in discussion put an end to students’ passivity. Students bee actively involved when forced to question their own ideas as well as their instructor’s. their listening skills improve dramatically in the excitement of intellectual giveandtake with their instructors and yellow students. Such interchanges help professors do their job better because they allow them to discover who knows what—before final exams, not after. When exams are given in this type of course, they can require analysis and synthesis from the students, not empty memorization. Classes like this require energy, imagination, and mitment from professors, all of which can be exhausting. But they pel students to share responsibility for their own intellectual growth.如果班級較小又要求學生參加討論，這就會消除學生的被動性。此外，如果聽課給某些學生袖手旁觀，而讓老師唱主角的機會，這也給一些教授提供了炫耀其才學的不可抗拒的舞臺。對任何人來說，講課都比辯論容易。對許多管理者而言，這基本上就是他們所關(guān)心的了。If lectures make so little sense, why have they been allowed to continue? Administrators love them, of course. They can cram far more students into a lecture hall than into a discussion class, and for many administrators that is almost the end of the story. But the truth is that faculty members, and even students, conspire with them to keep the lecture system alive and well. Lectures are easier on everyone than debates. Professors can pretend to teach by lecturing just as students can pretend to learn by attending lectures, with no one the wiser, including the participants. Moreover, if lectures afford some students an opportunity to sit back and let the professor run the show, they offer some professors an irresistible forum for showing off. In a classroom where everyone contributes, students are less able to hide and professors less tempted to engage in intellectual exhibitionism.如果說講課如此不同情理，為什么還一直允許繼續(xù)下去呢？當然是因為教學管理者喜歡了。沒有這些