新編大學英語第四冊unit7 Text C: College Pressures
UNIT 7 AFTER-CLASS READING 2; New College English (IV)
College Pressures
1 Dear Carlos: I desperately need a dean's excuse for my chemistry midterm which will begin in about 1 hour. All I can say is that I wasted this week. I've fallen incredibly, inconceivably behind.
2 Carlos: Help! I'm anxious to hear from you. I'll be in my room and won't leave it until I hear from you. Tomorrow is the last day for...
3 Carlos: Probably by Friday I'll be able to get back to my studies. Right now I'm going to take a long walk. This whole thing has taken a lot out of me.
4 Who are these miserable people making urgent requests for help, scribbling notes so laden with anxiety? They are men and women who belong to Branford College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University, and the messages are just a few of hundreds that they left for their dean, Carlos Hortas often slipped under his door at 4 A.M.
5 But students like the ones who wrote those notes can also be found on campuses from coast to coast. Nobody could doubt that the notes are real. In their urgency and their gallows humor they are authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed.
6 My own connection with the message writers is that I am master of Branford College. I live on the campus and know the students well. If they went to Carlos to ask how to get through tomorrow, they come to me to ask how to get through the rest of their lives.
7 Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don't want to hear such liberating news. They want a map right now that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, Social Security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.
8 What I wish for all students is some release from the threatening grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.
9 My wish, of course, is naive. One of the few rights that America does not proclaim is the right to fail. Achievement is the national god, worshipped in our media the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive and glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.
10 "In the late 1960s," one dean told me, "the typical question that I got from students was 'Why is there so much suffering in the world?' or 'How can I make a contribution?' Today it's 'Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?'"
11 Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, in Yale's official system of grading, A means "excellent" and B means "very good". Today, looking very good is no longer good enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh. Yale Law School, for instance, accepts 170 students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000.
12 The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are the days when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of courses music, art, philosophy, classics, poetry that would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates who have this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds excite me. I like to hear their ideas. I don't know if they are getting As or Cs, and I don't care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They can't.
13 Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part time at college and full time during the summer, to have $5, 000 in loans after four years loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning?
14 Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.
15 I see many students taking pre-medical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.
16 "Do you want to go to medical school?" I ask them.
17 "I guess so, " they say, without conviction, or "Not really."
18 "Then why are you going?"
19 "Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They're paying all this money and..."
20 Poor students, poor parents. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean well; they are trying to steer their sons and daughters toward a secure future. But the sons and daughters want to major in history or classics or philosophy subjects with no "practical" value. Where's the payoff on the humanities? It's not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward a specific profession courses that are pre-law, premedical, pre-business, or, as I sometimes heard it put, "pre-rich".
21 Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.
22 "I had a freshman student I'll call Linda," one dean told me, "who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I couldn't tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda."
23 The story is almost funny except that it's not. It's symptomatic of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I hear the clacking of computer keyboards in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: "Will I get everything done?"
24 Probably they won't. They will get sick. They will get "blocked." Hey Carlos, help!
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