[转载]Illuminating One's Bright Virtue 照亮人性之美
2013-07-16 09:19阅读：
福斯特校长讲到高等教育的功能和理想是致力于照亮人性之美，探求真理，那么哈佛大学是如何探求真理的呢？她指出哈佛，科研和教学必须紧密联系在一起，鼓励学生创新，鼓励学生质疑，挑战权威，开展讨论和辩论，同时加大跨学科研究，跨国界研究。
'Illuminating One's Bright Virtue': Higher Education
in a Changing World (II)
照亮人性之美: 变动世界中的高等教育
by Drew Faust
I
have
learned that one of
the
basic texts of Chinese civilization describes education this
way:' The way of Great Learning lies in illuminating one's bright
virture.' This is at the heart of a great university. It is even
captured in the Chinese word for 'university'.(大学，大学之道）
How do we find this
illumination?
How do we pursue truth from day
to day? One of
the fundamental
commitments of the American reserch university, as it has
evolved over the decades, is
that the discovery of truth and the imparting ( to make known, bestow 传授，告知）of truth
must be connected. The processes of scholarly research and the
teaching of students are fundamentally interwined. Students at
Harvard are instructed by faculty working at the frontiers of their
fields, and we seek to engage students themselves directly in the
reserch process. We have begun to restructure our
introductory science classses so that students working in
laboratories will not just repeat experiments with known outcomes
but will learn techniques and principles by exploring unsolved
problems together with their professors. In every field from
sciences to social sciences and humanities we encourage sutdents to
undertake original research, and nearly half of our undergrduates
write these during their final year of colleage pursuing
original questions, seeking new truths within their chosen areas of
study.
If research is the
pursuit of truth, teaching is the instrument
of its propagation (spreading to a larger area or greater
number;dissemination 传播，普及). Our ideas about teaching have
continuously evovled throughout Harvard's history. In its early
days, teaching centered on rote learning through recitaion. But as
we have come to see truth as pursuit rather than possession, our
teaching has come to focus more on questioning, interchanges, and
challenges - on equipping our students with the skills and
attitudes they need for a lifetime of learning - and we have
structured more of our classes as debates and discussions.
Our Law and
Business schools have proud traditions of classrooms centered on
fast moving interchanges between students and professors. In our
undergraduate college we have recently revised the curriculum to
create more such opportunities, especially through smaller classes
that encourage close faculty - student interaction. For
these students, we are introducing a new curriculum designed to
help them become thoughtful citizens of the 21st century. In this
program of study we reaffirm our commitment
to the liberal arts, to the belief that undergradute
education should not consist of training for a profession or
immersion in one specialized area of inquiry. Instead we ask our
students to undertake a broad range of studies, incluling fields
vey distant from those in which they may eventually become expert,
and distant from careers they may later pursue. We ask them to
stretch beyond the familiar and the
comfortable.
In the words of the
report on our curricula reforms , we aim to ' unsettle students'presumptions ...(?) to reveal what is going on beneath and behind
appearances, to disorient' our
students and then 'help them to find ways to reorient themselves'.
Or, perhaps one could say, to 'illuminate their bright
virtue'. Truth emerges from debate,
from disagreement, from questions and doubt. (!!!)
' We provoke students
to think and argue,' one professor says , ' not only with us
and each other but with themselves.' The
restless mind, the challenging mind is the expanding and creative
mind, the mind prepared for the changes that will confront
us all in the years to come.
Just as we are
seeking truth in new ways, so we are findig it in new places. The
disciplinary fields into which knowledge has been traditinally
sturcture are shifting and merging . We find ourselves increasingly
crossing intellectual boundaries. The
sciencs are transforming one another . Life and physical sciences
combine as we explore emerging fields like bioengineering or
computational biology. And science reaches out beyond its own
domain to the social sciences and humanities to find its proper
place in the world. How can we best address global warming? How do
we understand the meaning of suffering? When the Harvard Stem Cell
Institure formed, its founder knew its members would have to
include, in their words,' not only ...scientists and reserch
phycicians... but also members of Harvard's faculties of law,
government, divinity, business, and the humanities.' I a recent
course entitled,' Ethics, Biotechnology and the Future of Hamn
Natre,' the head of Harvard's stem cell initiative described
discoveries in biology while a government and ethics professor
provoked the class with questins. Should a deaf couple be allowed
to deliberately conceive a deaf child? Is it wrong to create
a huamn- animal hybrid? When does human life begin?
It is
not just the sciences that are embarked on ( to star something new or important
开始、从事）new paths in serch of truth.The humanities and social
sciences engage across disciplnes as well. The impact of the
history of impetialism on literature has yielded an
area of rich inquiry known as ' post colonial studies'. The
intersectins of law and economics porduce new approaches to
understanding the nature of both legal systems and goverment of
Shakes peare in The Merchant of Venice helps us grap the impact of
captital punichment (punishment
by death, as ordered by a legal system 死刑） a Law School couse on
moral and legal reasoning.
The search for truth in the
21st century demands that we cross not just discilinary borders,
but natinal ones, as my presence here attests. ( to bear witmess 证明）As our global
connections increse, we find that truths must by conceived
internationlly. Our sociologists' notins of design, must be global
in reach; our Business School writes the case studies that provide
the core of its curriculum about firms and organizations in China
and India and other countries as well as the United Staets; our law
students are now required to study internatinal law during their
very first year at Harvard.
Researchers in the School of Public Health
investigate Chinese women's brest cancer risk, making comparisons
with this disease incidence in Caucasians. (the races of people who have
pale-coulored skin 白种人）Epidemiology comes to different conclusions
in different settings; its truth must be explored globally. Our
Divinity School, founded nearly 400 years ago to train Christian
ministers, now studies the religinos of the world - from Buddhism
to Islam to Hinduism to its own Congregationalist Christian roots.
Until very recently - really the past decade - we did not encourage
our undergraduate students to study abroad. Now we urge them to
spend time outside the United State during the couse of their years
at Harvard. There has been a more than 300 percent increse in the
number of undergraduates studying,researchng or interning ( to
train or serve as an intern 实习）in China alone. Medical students are
working at five different sites in China. And we welcome far more
international students to Harvard as well, totaling nearly 20
percent of students across the schools and including 1,400 Asian
students currently enrolled at the University.
A hundred years ago, in Beida's early
years,Harvard faculty and students were very differnt people than
they are today, and they would have taught, studid, adn pursued
learning in very different ways. They would even then have
understood themselves to be seeking the truths of knowledge, the
illumination of their bright virtue. Our presence here today is one
result of that pursuit, of the questions they asked, of the
challenges they mounted to the assumptions of an earlier era, of
the changes their discoveries brought to the world.
As products and as beneficiaries of these
traditions, we hold special obligations. We owe these debts not merely to the past but to the
future. It is our responsibility that the principles
of openness, the habits of curiosity, the dedication to a community
of learning be sustained and nourished
for the next century to come. And it is ours to ensure that
the new meanings of the word truth -veritas (?) that
I have described today both inspire us and define our
progress.
《考试与评价》
大学英语 四级考试版 2008 08 33页 ISSN 1009-6027 / CN22-1387/G4
