淘金式巧攻英语四级词汇解析第十三期

文章作者 100test 发表时间 2007:09:06 11:43:22
来源 100Test.Com百考试题网

When most people think of the word “education,” they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casing, the teachers are supposed to stuff “education”.

But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago , is not inserting the stuffing of information into a person ,but rather eliciting knowledge from him. It is the drawing out of what is in the mind.

“The most important part of education,” once wrote William Ernest Hocking, the distinguished Harvard philosopher, “is this instruction of a man in what he has inside him”

So many of the discussions and controversies about the content of education are futile and inconclusive because they are concerned with what should “go into “ the student rather than with what should be taken out, and how this can best be done.

A college student who once said to me , after a lecture, “I spend so much time studying that I don’t have a chance to learn anything,” was briefly expressing his dissatisfaction with the sausage-casing view of education.

He was being so stuffed with miscellaneous facts, with such an indigestible mass of material, that he had no time (and was given no encouragement) to draw on his own resources, to use his own mind for analyzing and synthesizing and evaluating this material.

Education, to have any meaning beyond the purpose of creating well-informed fools, must elicit from the pupil what is latent in every human being-the rules of reason, the inner knowledge of what is proper for men to be and do, the ability to sift evidence and come to conclusions that can generally assented to by all open minds and warm hearts.

Pupils are more like oysters than sausages . The job of teaching is not to stuff them and then seal them up. But to help them open and reveal the riches within. There are pearls in each of us , if only we knew how to cultivate them with enthusiasm and persistence.

stuff 和 material 的辨析

stuff n. 原料，材料 vt. 填进，填满 stuff …. With sth 把某物塞进；be stuffed with 填满了…；material n. 材料，原料，素材，资料，a. 物质的，实体的，重要的

[用法]：其意为资料、真实材料时为不可数名词。

辨析：material 常用词，指制造物品所用的具体“原材料”或形成思想的抽象“素材、资料”；Stuff 非正式用词，不可数名词，指某种东西，前面多带有表示某种材料、物品的修饰语。

[例句]：
Great men are those who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force , that thoughts rule the world.
伟大的人物是那些认为精神力量比肉体力量更强大且靠思想统治世界的人。

What’s this sticky stuff on the floor?
地板上这粘糊糊的东西是什么？

作业: (解释单词并翻译段落)

analyze

conclusion

evaluate

flame

generally

ignorant

inner

mass

resource seal

various

练习:

What is the real meaning of Socrates’ words?

A. Education is the process of inserting knowledge into a human being.

B. Education is not only inserting knowledge, but also compressing knowledge.

C. Education intends to extract what are in the students’ mind already.

D. Education is to stuff the students as a sort of animate sausage.

What is the meaning of the word “miscellaneous” in Para.5

A. Different

B. Difficult

C. Various

D. Useless

作业答案：

analyze 分析,细查 vt.

conclusion 结论,推论,结尾 n.

evaluate 评估,评论 vt.

flame 火焰 n.

generally 一般地,普通,广泛地 ad.

ignorant 不知道,无知的 a.

inner 内部的,里面的 a.

mass n.众多,大量,群众 , a. 大量的, v. 聚集

resource 资源,财力 n.

seal 封条,图章 n.

various 不同的,多方面的,各种各样的 a.

翻译:

如果教育不是为了造就一批博学的蠢材，如果教育要有所意义，那就必须把人人都潜在的才能从学生身上发掘出来——推理的规则、内心明白应当怎样做人和做事，有能力筛选证据并得出让所有开朗、热情的人赞同的结论。

练习答案:C，C