英语四级阅读200篇:Unit 47 passage 1

　　Many a brilliant youngster nowadays finds that his high school has assumed the aspects of a carnival. In one room pretty girls practice twirling batons. The sound of cheers is heard from the football field. The safe-driving class circles the block in new automobiles. Upstairs in the chemistry lab Mr. Smith is wearily trying to explain to a few boys that studying science can be fun but who pays any attention to him?

　　It is hard to deny that Americas schools have degenerated into a system for coddling and entertaining the mediocre . The facts of the school crisis are all out in plain sight and rather dreadful to look at. Most students avoid the tough, basis courses. Only 12 1/2 percent are taking any advanced mathematics; only 25 percent are studying physics. A modern foreign language is studied by fewer than 15 percent. Ten million Russians are studying English, but only 8000 Americans are studying Russian.

　　The diploma has been devaluated to the point of meaninglessness. Bernard Leibson, principal of a New York City junior high school, recently admitted that while signing diplomas he suffers great pangs of pedagogical conscience. Although Johnny cannot read above the fifth-grade level and Mary has barely mastered fourth-grade arithmetic, we perpetuate(使永存) the fiction that they have completed the course of study with a satisfactory record.

　　Almost every conceivable reason has been offered for this state of affairs. Marion B. Folsom, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, blames the curriculum, demands fewer so-called popular or easy courses. Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the atomic submarine, concurs.

　　One group says the students are lazy. Surveys by anthropologist Margaret Mead and by a group of Purdue scientists have shown that most youngsters avoid taking science subjects because they do not think a scientific career is worth all the effort.

　　Some say it is the parents fault. Dean Harry D. Bonham of the University of Alabama says, There is too much parental laxity in requiring that youngsters study and do their homework. A junior high school teacher recently wrote that students are being smothered with anxious concern, softened with lack of exercise, seduced with luxuries, the flung into the morass of excessive entertainment. They are overfed and under-worked. They have too much leisure and too little discipline.

　　And finally the whole nation has been accused. A Dartmouth professor of chemistry wrote recently: I am concerned about the easy living in this country. In the past, the leisure class always had some demanding ideal bravery in war, social grace, or the responsible wielding of power. The only corresponding idea in U. S. society is being a good guy.

　　Some of the criticism is the inevitable blowing off of steam which accompanies a democracys efforts toward self-improvement. Still, the statistics cannot be disputed and it would be difficult to deny that few diplomas stand for a fixed level of accomplishment of that great numbers of students fail to pursue their studies with vigor. Even brilliant children are not as advanced in the sciences as their opposite numbers in Europe or Russia. Why?

　　It may be useful to recall the way the U. S. school system developed. Fifty years ago our high schools were almost carbon copies of their European counter parts. They offered a narrow selection of strictly academic subjects.

　　Modern America change that. This was the land of equality. The schools began taking not only those who once would have fallen by the wayside for social or economic reason but also those who would formerly have been excluded for lack of academic aptitude or desire. It was pointed out that even the least intelligent youngster can learn something, A new dream was born in America.

　　Instead of trying to find students to fit a rigid curriculum, the schools decided to hand-tailor a course of instruction for each child. If Johnny could not learn mathematics they would teach him woodworking, adjust him to life, make him a better citizen. And they would give him a diploma as fancily lettered as anyone elses.

　　There was a basic humanity in these changes, and common sense too. Johnny undoubtedly was a better person and a more useful citizen after his four years of high school, even if the did not learn much in academic terms. And the destruction of social and economic barriers to education profited the nation enormously. The schools released a flood of energy and talent such as the world had never seen.

　　To run the new schools a new breed of educator appeared. Such men as John Dewey and his disciples invented some of the silliest language ever heard . But they emphasized some things that good teachers have known for centuries that children learn quicker when they are led to understand and enjoy their studies than when they are made to learn by rote , and that teachers should take the childs entire environment and nature into account in deciding how to teach him.

　　What went wrong?

　　In the first place, nobody foresaw how enormously expensive such a school system would be. Already spending more than any other nation on education, we were hardly able to provide the money needed for so much individual attention to so many.

　　Educators as a result were forced to design programs for the average student . Special course were provided for those experiencing unusual difficulty, but gifted students were largely ignored.

　　One by one the traditional spurs to effort were removed. Laws were passed requiring even the dullest students to remain in school until their middle or late teens, and the educators found they could expel almost no one. Soon they discovered that it was less damaging to all concerned to let dullards progress through the grades with their contemporaries than to hold them back and let them disrupt classes of younger children. Automatic promotion, automatic graduation, and report cards on which rarely was heard a discouraging word became the rule, and it was not one which inspired ever student to do his best.

　　Elsewhere, children had more incentive to study hard. In Europe the possession of a diploma has continued to be a social distinction, and the educated man is respected even if he is poor. In the Soviet Union, scientists and technicians are the new aristocrats, and the only way to join their ranks is through academic accomplishment no Russian boy can entertain the dream of leaving school early and making a million rubles as a salesman. In both Russian and the other European countries the bright student, because he is likely to become an important man, is widely admired by his contemporaries.

　　By contrast, the American youngster who arrives in school with an honest drive to learn finds himself branded a queer duck a difficult role indeed for most adolescents. Most of the public schools are simply not geared for him. True, he can usually find a chemistry or trigonometry course, and if he is lucky he may find a knowledgeable teacher who will greet him with open arms. But he must also contend with hordes of youngsters just drifting through school, in search of easy roads to high pay and with bland disregard of intellectual values.

　　1. The passage is mainly concerned with the reasons why the American high school can be compared to a carnival.

　　2. In the past, education was perceived as a way of self-improvement in America.

　　3. Emphasis on equality is one of the reasons for the degradation of American high school education.

　　4. American high school youngsters are faced with a bewildering choice of subjects.

　　5. Only students who have completed the course of-study satisfactorily are likely to be granted diplomas.

　　6. Popular education pays special attention to gifted students.

　　7. Most of the American students prefer advanced mathematics to physics.

　　8. Diplomas should be a representation of a certain level of______.

　　9. John Dewey advocated that to educate the child, his or her ______ should be

　　considered.

　　10. On Russia and other European countries the bright student is widely admired by his contemporaries because it is possible for him to become______.

　　1. Y 2. Y 3. Y 4. NG 5. N 6. N 7. N

　　8. accomplishment 9. entire environment and nature 10. an important man