XI. Translate from Russian into English paying special attention to the words in bold type.

Не заставляйте их ходить в школу

Может быть, тогда они перестанут
создавать нам проблемы

Гарри Энфилд

Мне кажется важным, что мы все пытаем­ся изменить жизнь к лучшему и в то же время сэконо­мить деньги. Мое предложение – снизить возраст обязательного пре­бывания в школе до 13 лет.

Каждый знает, что подростки от­вратительны. Существует мнение, что их изобрел Элвис Пресли, но на самом деле их придумало прави­тельство, объявив, что дети долж­ны оставаться в школе до 16 лет.

Подросткам так хочется стать взрослыми, а их заставляют идти в школу и они по-прежнему матери­ально завися т от своих родителей. Когда последние грозят отменой карманных денег и другими нака­заниями, подросток изрыгает ру­гательства и его лицо покрывается прыщами.

Пытаться научить подростков че­му-нибудь – в большинстве случаев абсолютно бесполезная трата уси­лий. Даже когда они вроде бы слу­шают, они на самом деле думают о сексе.

Итак, нужен специальный экза­мен для 12-летних и старше. Каж­дый ребенок, который сдаст его, мог бы бросить школу при условии, что его берет в ученики какая-ни­будь фирма. Если его уволят, он сно­ва должен будет вернуться в школу. У него также было бы право на че­тыре года «отложенного обучения», которым можно воспользоваться позднее.

Подростки сами зарабатывали бы на жизнь и чувствовали бы себя взрослыми. Зная, что их уволят, ес­ли они не будут стараться, они слишком уставали бы к вечеру и уже не смогли бы грубить родите­лям или притворяться, что делают домашнее задание у приятеля, от­правляясь по барам.

Появление на рынке труда огром­ной армии подростков поддержи­вало бы зарплату на низком уров­не, что в свою очередь порадовало бы Центробанк. Учителя смогли бы уменьшить число учеников в млад­ших классах, а те начали бы старать­ся, в надежде наконец дорасти до 13 лет. А у подростков была бы воз­можность сделать выбор и вернуть­ся к учебе, когда они, наконец, по­взрослеют и захотят учиться.

Sunday Telegraph Magazine (June,1, 1997),
London (Ридерз Дайджест, март-апрель 1999)

Discussion exercises

I. Do you agree or disagree to the given picture of the ideal teacher in the text below?

II. What other qualities or skills would you like to add? Why?

III. Do you know any teachers coming up to these standards?

IV. Do you think that these standards must be the same for school and college (Institute, University) teachers? Why?

The qualities of a teacher

by H.C. Dent

Here I want to try to give you an answer to the question: What personal qualities are desirable in a teacher? Probably no two people would draw up exactly similar lists, but I think the following would be generally accepted.

First, the teacher’s personality should be pleasantly, lively and attractive. This does not rule out people who are physically plain, or even ugly, because many such have great personal charm. But it does rule out such types as the over – excitable, melancholy, frigid, sarcastic, cynical, frustrated and over-bearing: I would say too, that it excludes all of dull or purely negative personality. I still stick to what I said in my earlier book: that school children probably ‘suffer more from bores than from brutes’.

Secondly, it is not merely desirable but essential for a teacher to have a genuine capacity for sympathy – in the literal meaning of that word; a capacity to tune in to the minds and feelings of other people, especially, since most teachers are school teachers, to the minds and feelings of children. Closely related with this is the capacity to be tolerant – not, indeed, of what is wrong, but of the frailty and immaturity of human nature which induce people, and again especially – children, to make mistakes.

Thirdly, I hold it essential for a teacher to be both intellectually and morally honest. This does not mean being a plaster saint. It means that he will be aware of his intellectual strengths, and limitations, and will have thought about and decided upon the moral principles by which his life shall be guided. There is no contradiction in my going on to say that a teacher should be a bit of an actor. That is part of the technique of teaching, which demands that every now and then a teacher should be able to put on an act – to enliven a lesson, correct a fault, or award praise. Children, especially young children, live in a world that is rather larger than life.

A teacher must remain mentally alert. He will not get into the profession if of low intelligence, but it is all too easy, even for people of above-average intelligence, to stagnate intellectually – and that means to deteriorate intellectually. A teacher must be quick to adapt himself to any situation, however improbable (they happen!) and able to improvise, if necessary at less than a moment’s notice. (Here I should stress that I use ‘he’ and ‘his’ throughout the book simply as a matter of convention and convenience).

On the other hand, a teacher must be capable of infinite patience. This, I may say, is largely a matter of self-discipline and self-training; we are none of us born like that. He must be pretty resilient; teaching makes great demands on nervous energy. And he should be able to take in his stride the innumerable petty irritations any adult dealing with children has to endure.

Finally, I think a teacher should have the kind of mind which always wants to go on learning. Teaching is a job at which one will never be perfect; there is always something more to learn about it. There are three principal objects of study: the subject, or subjects which the teacher is teaching; the methods by which they can best be taught to the particular pupils in the classes he is teaching; and – by far the most important – the children, young people, or adults to whom they are to be taught. The two cardinal principles of British education today are that education is education of the whole person, and that it is best acquired through full and active co-operation between two persons, the teacher and the learner.

(From Teaching as a Career by H.C. Dent, Batsford, 1961

V. Do profound reading of the text and express your opinion on the following:

What is education for?

What is it for you personally?

AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE?

There is a problem that will touch us all – men, women and children – in the not too distant future, a problem that resolves itself into a question: what is education for? At the moment most of us can answer that fairly practically and without too much soul-searching. On the lowest level education is for enabling us to cope in an adult world where money must be added up, tax forms filled in, numbers looked up in telephone directories, maps read, curtains measured and street signs understood. On the next level it is for getting some kind of job that will pay a living wage.

But we are already peering into a future so different from anything we would now recognise as familiar that the last of these two educational aims may become as obsolete as a dodo. Basic skills (reading, writing and arithmetic) will continue to be necessary but these, after all, can be taught to children in from one to two years during their childhood. But education with a view to working for a living, at least in the sense of earning daily bread, may well be on its way out right now for the majority of us. Then the question «what is education for?» becomes much more complex. Because what the future proclaims is: an education is an education is an education.

In other words, our grandchildren may well spend their lives learning as, today, we spend our lives working. This does not simply involve a straightforward substitution of activity but a complete transformation of motive. We work for things basically unconnected with that work – usually money, prestige, success, security. We will learn for learning’s sake alone: a rose is a rose because it is and not what we can get out of it. Nor need any cynic doubt that we shall not wish to work without there being any obvious end in view. Already, adult education classes are overcrowded – one friend of mine teaching French literature says she could have had 10 pupils for every one she has.

Nevertheless, we still live in a very competitive society and most of us will need to reshuffle the furniture of our minds in order to gear our children towards a future in which outer rewards – keeping up with the Joneses – become less relevant than inner and more individual spurs. The existence of competition has always meant doing things because they win us some essentially unconnected advantage but the aim of the future must be to integrate the doing with its own reward, like virtue.

Oddly enough it is in America, that citadel of competitiveness, that the first experiments in this change of mind are taking place. In that New World, there are already organizations set up to examine ways in which competitiveness can be replaced by other inner-directed forms of rewards and pleasures. Take one interesting example in a Foundation whose aim is to transform competitive sport. A tug-of-war, as we all know, consists of one team pitting its strength against another team. The aim is to tug the opposing team over a line and, by doing so, win.

In the brand-new non-competitive version, things are very different. There are still two teams on either end of a rope but now the aim is not to win but to maintain the struggle. As the two teams tug, any individual on either team who senses a coming victory must let go the winning end of the rope and rush over to lend his weight to the other side, thus redressing the balance, and keeping the tug-of-war going as long as possible. If you actually imagine doing this, the startling fact that emerges is that the new game offers more possibilities of individual judgement and skill just because victory is not the aim and the tug-of-war is ended only by defeat of those judgements and skills. What’s more, I think most people would get more pleasure out of the neo-tug than the old winners-take-all concept.

So could it be for learning. Most of us, at some time or another, have glimpsed one of the real inner pleasures of education – a sort of one-person chase after an elusive goal that pits You only against You or, at the very most, against the discoveries of the greatest minds of other generations. On a more humble level, most of us have already got some pleasurable hobby that we enjoy for its own sake and become expert in for that enjoyment. In my own stumbling efforts, since last year, to learn the piano, I have seen the future and it works.

(From an article by Jill Tweedie in the Guardian)