四级冲刺练习阅读（185）

　　Its time to Close Our Carnivals

　　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?