優秀的綿羊

編譯_黃立旖（實習記者）

優秀的綿羊

編譯_黃立旖（實習記者）

八月初，一篇標題為《精致的利己主義者和常青藤的綿羊》的文章被瘋狂轉載，原始文章閱讀量迅速突破兩百萬。作者在文中將《優秀的綿羊》中的美式教育批判和中式教育批判做了一個平行對比，到底是換湯不換藥還是舊杯裝新茶，讀者不妨自行做評判。

This book, in many ways, is a letter to my twenty-year-old self. It talks about the kinds of things I wish that someone had encouraged me to think about when I was going to college—such as what the point of college might be in the first place.

這本書，寫給二十歲的我自己。它包含了許多值得思考的話題，早在我快要上大學的時候，我就希望有人能這樣鼓勵我思考。

I was like so many kids today (and so many kids back then). I went off to college like a sleepwalker, like a zombie. College was a blank. College was the“next thing.” You went to college, you studied something, and afterward you went on to the next next thing, most probably some kind of graduate school.

我和現在的大多數孩子一樣，行尸走肉般地選擇了上大學這條路。大學對我來說是個未知數，它只是理所當然的“下一站”。考大學，學點東西，然后再按部就班去讀研。

Up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth, getting to the top—in a word, “success.” As for where you went to school, that was all about bragging rights, so of course you chose the most prestigious place that let you in. What it meant to actually get an education, and why you might want one—how it could help you acquire a self, or develop an independent mind, or find your way in the world—all this was off the table. Like kids today, I was processed through a system everyone around me simply took for granted.

有一些目標在牽引著迷糊的我：地位、財富、削尖腦袋擠進上流社會。總的來說，就是要取得成功。選擇大學就是選擇可以吹噓的資本，所以你理所當然，會在錄取你的學校中選擇一所最有名的大學。至于接受高等教育的意義，為什么你要接受這種教育，它會如何開發自我，培養獨立的思維，或者教你在這個世界上立足，這統統不是你會考慮的重點。就像現在的孩子一樣，我和周圍的人都把讀大學當成想當然的事情。

I started college in 1981. The system, then, was in its early days, but it was already, unmistakably, a system, a set of tightly interlocking parts. When I speak in this book of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them: the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants, test-prep courses and enrichment programs; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brandname graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the BA; and the parents and communities, largely upper middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education.

我1981年讀的大學。高等教育體系在那時候還處于起步階段，但毫無疑問，它已經開始成形。我在這本書談的精英教育指的是一些名校，比如哈佛、斯坦福，或是威廉姆斯學院，還有更多二線的重點學校，但同時它也指通往大學的必由之路：私立的和優質的公立高中；日益增長的咨詢顧問產業，應試培訓班和提升項目；大學申請過程本身就如同一條守在成人世界大門的龍；本科畢業后大學自帶的名牌效應和就業崗位；把他們孩子推進高等教育機器口中的那些絕大部分來自中上層階級的父母。簡單來說，我們整個體系都是為精英設計的。

What that system does to kids and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it—those are the subjects of this book. I was teaching a class at Yale on the literature of friendship. One day we got around to talking about the importance of being alone. The ability to engage in introspection, I suggested, is the essential precondition for living the life of the mind, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. My students took this in for a second—introspection, solitude, the life of the mind, things they probably had not been asked to think about before—then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”

這樣的體系會怎樣影響孩子，這些孩子又該怎樣逃離體系的限制，這種體系對我們社會有什么影響，我們的社會又該如何解除這種影響—這是我將在書里討論的主題。我曾在耶魯教授《文學中的友誼》。有一天我們討論獨處的重要性。我認為，自省能力是成為一個有思想的人的前提，而孤獨是開始自省的前提。我的學生花了一些時間，來消化我的想法，自省，孤獨，精神，他們從未思索過這些主題。有一名學生開始領悟：“所以，你的意思是說，我們所有人只是像一群優秀的綿羊？”

All? Surely not. But after twentyfour years in the Ivy League—college at Columbia; a PhD at the same institution, including five years as a graduate instructor; and ten years, altogether, on the faculty at Yale—that was more or less how I had come to feel about it. The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it. In 2008, on my way out the door, I published an essay that sketched out a few of these criticisms. Titled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” the article appeared in the American Scholar, a small literary quarterly. At best, I thought, it might get a few thousand readers.

所有人？當然不是。但是在從藤校之一的哥倫比亞大學的學院畢業24年以后，在這里拿到了博士學位以后，其中的五年是研究生輔導員；在耶魯工作了十年后—我多多少少開始覺得，這個體系在批量生產著機智而有天賦的學生，但同時，他們焦慮，膽怯又迷茫，幾乎沒有學術方面的好奇心，行事不果決，只是被裹在被優越感包裝著的泡沫里逆來順受，悶頭蒼蠅似的往一個方面趕，他們都知道自己在做什么，都做得很好，可是他們不知道這樣做的理由。2008年，我發表了一篇文章，稍稍批評了這個現象。文章名字叫做《精英教育的弊端》，這篇文章在《美國學術》刊物上發表了，這是一個小學術季刊。我預測，會讀這篇文章的頂多只有幾千人。

Instead, it started to go viral almost from the moment it came out. Within a few weeks, the piece had been viewed a hundred thousand times (with many times that number in the months and years to come). Apparently I’d touched a nerve. These were not just the grumblings of an ex-professor. As it turned out from the many emails I began to get, the vast majority from current students and recent graduates, I had evoked a widespread discontent among today’s young high achievers—a sense that the system was cheating them out of a meaningful education, instilling them with values they rejected but couldn’t somehow get beyond.

然而，在發表之后，這篇文章被廣泛傳閱。幾個星期之內，閱讀量就達到幾十萬次。顯然我觸到了大家的敏感神經。這些話不只是我的怨言，從我收到的郵件里，我發現，大多數人都是在讀的或是剛畢業的學生，我引發了精英人群廣泛的不滿—這種感覺就像是這個很有意義的教育體制欺騙了他們，給他們灌輸自己反對但卻無法推翻的價值。