Unit 7
private colleges now comes to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered by inflation. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up. Health-premium costs are up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in America the creation of a brotherhood of paupers — colleges, parents, and students, joined by the common bond of debts.
Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.
I see many students taking premedical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.
―Do you want to go to medical school?‖ I ask them.
―I guess so,‖ they say, without conviction, or ―Not really.‖ ―Then why are you going?‖
―Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They‘re paying all this money and …‖
Poor students, poor parents. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean well; they are trying to steer their sons and daughters toward a secure future. But the sons and daughters want to major in history or classics or philosophy — subjects with no ―practical‖ value. Where‘s the payoff on the humanities? It‘s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics — an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective — are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward a specific profession.
Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.
―I had a freshman student I‘ll call Linda,‖ one dean told me, ―who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I couldn‘t tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.‖
The story is symptomatic of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they could sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clacking of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I get everything done?”
Part of the problem is that they do more than they are expected to do. A professor will assign five-page papers. Several students will start writing ten-page papers to impress him. Then more students will write ten-page papers, and a few will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.
―Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,‖ one dean points out, ―it‘s bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic works, psychologically.
Ultimately it will be the students‘ own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents‘ dreams and their classmates‘ fears. They must
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be jolted into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.
Notes
1. About the author and the text: William Zinsser was born in 1922 in New York City, and studied at Princeton University. He was a feature writer, film critic, and drama editor for the New York Herald Tribune and later a columnist for Look and Life, and has also written numerous books. In 1971 he took a teaching position in the English department at Yale University. He is the author of the best-selling book On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction (1976).
2. They’re trying to find an edge — the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal. (Paragraph 2) ―Edge‖ here means an advantage over others, as in the expression ―have the edge on / over,‖ meaning ―be slightly better than someone or something because you have an advantage they do not have.‖ What the dean means is that they try to find an advantage over others, i.e. they try to have higher marks on their transcript, so that they will appear to be academically superior to others. This is especially so when two students are more or less the same. But the dean seems to think that marks are not really very reliable and valid indications of the real quality of the students.
3. sampling a wide variety of courses (Paragraph 4) taking numerous courses without necessarily going deep into any of them …
4. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates who have this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. (Paragraph 4) If I were an employer, I would employ those students who take all these courses and thus have a wide range of knowledge and are always curious about what is new and unknown; I would not employ those who only take those courses they can safely pass and score high marks.
5. But they are equally battered by inflation. (Paragraph 5) But they (the colleges) are as badly affected by inflation as the parents and the students are.
6. We are witnessing in America the creation of a brotherhood of paupers — colleges, parents, and students, joined by the common bond of debts. (Paragraph 5) Here in America we find coming into being a union of colleges, parents, and students; what they have in common is that they are all in debt.
7. tenacity (Paragraph 7) determination to continue what one is doing
8. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. (Paragraph 12) A web is a complicated pattern of connections or relationships. Both the students and their parents find themselves caught in a web: The parents, out of good intention, want their children to take courses which they think are more profitable; the children are not interested in these courses, but they feel they just have to take them, otherwise they would suffer from a sense of guilt because it is their parents who have paid for their education. Such a web has long been in existence in human history, thus ―one of the oldest webs.‖
9. Where’s the payoff on the humanities? (Paragraph 12) What financial benefit can students get from courses in humanities? ―Humanities‖ are subjects such as history, philosophy, and literature, which are concerned with human ideas and behavior. Such courses do not usually lead immediately to profitable occupations as courses related to law and medicine do. 10. self-induced pressure (Paragraph 13) pressure brought on by the students themselves
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11. The story is symptomatic of all the pressures put together. (Paragraph 15) The story indicates all the pressures combined.
Questions for discussion
1. How do you interpret the last sentence of the first paragraph ―There are no villains; only victims‖?
2. From Zinsser‘s quotation of a certain dean in the 2nd paragraph, what idea do you get of the difference between the students in the late 1960s and students of the time when the article was written (presumably in the 1970s–1980s)?
3. Why do students, both of those who want to enter graduate schools and those who just want to graduate and get a job, attach so much importance to grades?
4. Zinsser obviously holds a different opinion from many of the parents with regard to the courses the students should take. Describe this difference and voice your own opinion.
5. According to the text, what mentality underlies peer pressure and self-induced pressure?
6. As a college student do you feel any of the four pressures Zinsser has described in the text? Is there any other pressure you feel? Discuss with your classmates the pressure(s) you feel and try to suggest a way ―to break the circles in which you are trapped.‖
Key to questions for discussion
1. No one is really to blame for the pressures working on college students, not the colleges, or the professors, or the parents, or the students themselves. In fact, they (the colleges, the professors, the parents, and the students) are all victims.
2. The students in the late 1960s seemed to be more concerned with what was happening in the world as a whole, and what they could do to make our world a better place to live in. The college students of the time when the article was written were more concerned about their own future and career; they seemed to be more egoistic.
3. To both kinds of students, a good transcript will serve as a passport to security. They want their grades to look better so that they can either be enrolled by a graduate school or find a good job. 4. Most parents want their sons and daughters to take courses that would lead them to occupations with a good payoff such as law and medicine. But Zinsser would rather that they took a wide range of courses in the humanities, such as philosophy, history, music, and religion, so that they would become liberally well-educated men and women.
5. The mentality that underlies peer pressure and self-induced pressure is the fear of being outshone by one‘s fellow students, the fear of appearing inferior. 6. Open to discussion.
II. Memorable Quotes
What do you think are the aims of education? Read the following quotes and find out whether your opinions echo the speakers’.
Guidance: The aim of education, as Newman said, is to nurture a person, a good citizen rather than a hero. Education could be a philosophical problem with its social responsibility and responsibility for personal growth.
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1. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
— Henry Adams (适当位置插入Henry Adams图片并加注)
Henry Adams (1838–1918) was an American educator, journalist, historian, and novelist.
Paraphrase: It is astonishing that education would only increase a lack of knowledge about the world, if it is about the factual information such as theories, concept and facts regardless of the real application.
2. The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
— Malcolm Forbes (适当位置插入Malcolm Forbes图片并加注)
Malcolm Stevenson Forbes (1919–1990) was the publisher of Forbes magazine, today run by his son.
Paraphrase: The aim of education is to help one who knows little become receptive to new ideas and more possibilities.
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