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《英语世界》杂志社
2013年5月
【翻译大赛原文】
The
Alternate Life
The alternate life is the consequence of the
communications revolution of the last 30 years or so. There is another, highly
competitive educational system, opposed in almost every essential way to
traditional schooling, that operates on the child and youth from the age of 2.
It takes up as much of his time as the school does, and it works on him with far
greater effectiveness.
That system is the linked structure of which
television is the heart and which numbers among its constituents film, radio,
comic books, pop music, sports—and the life styles (including the drug culture,
permissive sex, and systematized antisocial conduct) which this structure either
automatically or deliberately produces.
This alternative life is a life;
it is not a diversion, a hobby, an amusement. It offers its own disciplines, its
own curriculum, its own ethical and cultural values, its own style and language.
It works on children and youths every day, year after year, teaching them,
forming them, conditioning them. And it is profoundly opposed to traditional
education. There is no way of reconciling the values of literature or science
with the values of the TV commercial. There is no way of reconciling the vision
offered by Shakespeare or Newton with the vision of life offered by the “Gong
Show”. Two systems of thought and feeling stand opposed to each
other.
This has never before been the case. The idea of education was
never before opposed by a competitor. It was taken for granted because no
alternative appeared on the horizon. But today there is a complete alternative
life to which children submit themselves. This alternative life offers them
heroes, slogans, images, forms of conduct, and content of a sort—and all run counter to the message given in
the classroom.
For the first time in history, the child is required to be
a citizen of two cultures: the tradition and the alternate life. Is it any
wonder that such a division of loyalties should result in the chaos we observe?
In a deep sense, all our children (and, to a degree, our teachers, our parents,
and ourselves) are schizophrenics. On the one hand is the reality-system
expounded in a book, the idea, the cultural past; on the other hand is the far
more vivid and comprehensible reality-system expounded by television, the rock
star, the religion of instantaneous sensation, gratification and
consumption.
Good teachers, when you question them inexorably, almost
always finally admit that their difficulties stem from the competition of the
alternate life. And this competition they are not trained to meet. The alternate
life has one special psychological effect that handicaps the teacher—any
teacher, whether of writing or any other basic subject. That effect is a decline
in the faculty of attention, and therefore a decline in the capacity to
learn—not the innate capacity, but the capacity as it is conditioned by the
media.
This conception of the alternate life is probably debatable, and it
certainly will not be accepted by everyone. Its claim to the interest of others,
if not their agreement, lies in the fact that it goes beyond the present
educational system and tries to locate the ultimate source of our troubles in
the changes now agitating our entire Western culture.
(节选自The Short Prose
Reader (second edition) by Gilbert H. Muller and Harvey S. Wiener, McGraw-Hill
Book Company, 1982。题目为本刊所加。)