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EARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.
如今，上学的孩子比以往任何时候都多，但他们学到的东西少得多。实际上，他们几乎什么都学不到。在墨西哥总人口中，识字的人群百分比在上升，但从绝对人数看，墨西哥现在的文盲人数多于12年前。即使掌握基线识字能力（看路标或新闻的能力）的人数在增加，但看书的人没有增加。墨西哥一度是教育水平较高的国家，但几年前，在联合国教科文组织(Unesco)对阅读习惯的一项评估中，墨西哥在108个国家中名列倒数第二。 One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?” 人们不禁会质问墨西哥的教育体系，“我把孩子交给你，每天六小时，每周五天，可你却交还给我一个基本文盲的人，这怎么可能？” Despite recent gains in industrial development and increasing numbers of engineering graduates, Mexico is floundering socially, politically and economically because so many of its citizens do not read. Upon taking office in December, our new president, Enrique Pe~na Nieto, immediately announced a program to improve education. This is typical. All presidents do this upon taking office. 尽管近年来取得了工业发展的进步，工科毕业生人数也在增加，但在社会、政治和经济领域，墨西哥正陷入困境，因为有那么多的墨西哥公民不看书。我们的新总统恩里克·培尼亚·涅托(Enrique Pe~na Nieto)12月上任伊始就立即宣布了改善教育的计划。这很典型。所有总统在上任之初都会这么做。 The first step in his plan to improve education? Put the leader of the teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo, in jail — which he did last week. Ms. Gordillo, who has led the 1.5 million-member union for 23 years, is suspected of embezzling about $200 million. 他改善教育计划的第一步是什么？把教师工会主席埃尔芭·埃斯特·戈迪略(Elba Esther Gordillo)关进监狱，他上周就这么做了。戈迪略领导这个拥有150万会员的工会长达23年，她涉嫌挪用约2亿美元（合人民币12.44亿元人民币）。 She ought to be behind bars, but education reform with a focus on teachers instead of students is nothing new. For many years now, the job of the education secretary has been not to educate Mexicans but to deal with the teachers and their labor issues. Nobody in Mexico organizes as many strikes as the teachers’ union. And, sadly, many teachers, who often buy or inherit their jobs, are lacking in education themselves. 她理应入狱，但把焦点放在老师（而非学生）身上的教育改革没有任何新意。多年来，教育部长的工作不是教育墨西哥人，而是应付老师以及他们的待遇问题。在墨西哥，没人像教师工会那样组织那么多的罢工。而且，令人悲哀的是，许多教师的工作往往是买来的，或是通过继承得到的，他们自己的教育程度也不高。 During a strike in 2008 in Oaxaca, I remember walking through the temporary campground in search of a teacher reading a book. Among tens of thousands, I found not one. I did find people listening to disco-decibel music, watching television, playing cards or dominoes, vegetating. I saw some gossip magazines, too. 记得2008年在瓦哈卡举行的一次罢工期间，我在临时的宿营地穿行，想找到一个正在阅读的教师。在数万教师中，竟然一个都找不到。我的确发现有一些人无所事事，在听迪斯科音乐、看电视、打牌或玩骰子。我也看到了一些八卦杂志。 So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response when I spoke at a recent event for promoting reading for an audience of 300 or so 14- and 15-year-olds. “Who likes to read?” I asked. Only one hand went up in the auditorium. I picked out five of the ignorant majority and asked them to tell me why they didn’t like reading. The result was predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to articulate a sentence, express an idea. 所以，在前不久一次推广阅读的活动上，当我面对300来名14、15岁的孩子演讲时，我本不应对他们的反馈感到惊讶。“谁喜欢看书？”我问。礼堂里只有一只手举了起来。我在无知的多数人群中挑出五个人，让他们告诉我，为什么不喜欢看书。结果是可以预见的：他们说话结结巴巴，嘟嘟囔囔，变得不耐烦。没有一个人能说出一个整句，表达出一个观点。 Frustrated, I told the audience to just leave the auditorium and go look for a book to read. One of their teachers walked up to me, very concerned. “We still have 40 minutes left,” he said. He asked the kids to sit down again, and began to tell them a fable about a plant that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a flower or a head of cabbage. 我很受挫，让他们离开礼堂，去找本书看。这时一名老师走到我面前，看起来很担心。“我们还剩40分钟呢，”他说。他让那些孩子重新坐下，开始给他们讲一个寓言故事，有关一棵植物，它无法决定自己想成为一朵花还是一颗卷心菜。 “Sir,” I whispered, “that story is for kindergartners.” “先生，”我低声说，“这个故事只适合幼儿园孩子。” In 2002, President Vicente Fox began a national reading plan; he chose as a spokesman Jorge Campos, a popular soccer player, ordered millions of books printed and built an immense library. Unfortunately, teachers were not properly trained and children were not given time for reading in school. The plan focused on the book instead of the reader. I have seen warehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of forgotten books, intended for schools and libraries, simply waiting for the dust and humidity to render them garbage. 2002年，比森特·福克斯(Vicente Fox)总统启动了一个覆盖全国的阅读计划，他选了广受欢迎的足球运动员豪尔赫·坎波斯(Jorge Campos)担任代言人，下令印刷了数百万本书，造了一座巨大的图书馆。不幸的是，老师没有得到适当的培训，孩子们在学校里也没有得到阅读时间。该计划聚焦于书本，而不是读者。我曾看到一些仓库里堆放着数十万本被遗忘的书，它们本来应该在学校或图书馆里，但现在只是等着灰尘和潮湿把它们变成垃圾。 A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” I explained the difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between deciphering street signs and accessing the literary canon. He wondered what the point of the students’ reading “Don Quixote” was. He said we needed to teach them to read the newspaper. 几年前，我和我所居住的新莱昂州的教育部长说起学校的阅读情况。他看着我，不明白我想要什么。“在学校里，老师教孩子读书，”他说。“对，”我回答，“但他们不看书。”我解释了知道怎么阅读和真正看书之间的不同，以及看路标和阅读文学经典之间的区别。他说他不知道学生们看《唐吉诃德》(Don Quixote)有什么意义。他说，我们需要教他们看报纸。 When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology textbooks,” she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the same time.” In our schools, children are being taught what is easy to teach rather than what they need to learn. It is for this reason that in Mexico — and many other countries — the humanities have been pushed aside. 我女儿15岁时，她的文学老师在课堂上全面禁止小说类作品。“我们将要读历史和生物教科书，”她说，“因为这样，你们一边阅读，一边能学到知识。”在我国的学校里，老师讲授容易教的内容，而不是孩子们需要学的内容。正是因为这个原因，在墨西哥（乃至其他许多国家），人文科学受到排挤。 We have turned schools into factories that churn out employees. With no intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. In this light it is natural that in secondary school we are training chauffeurs, waiters and dishwashers. 我们已经将学校变成了工厂，大批量产出雇员。学生们不会遭遇任何智力上的挑战，他们只要去上课，并听老师的话，就能从一级升到下一级。难怪我们的中学正在培养大量司机、侍者、洗碗工。 This is not just about better funding. Mexico spends more than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on education — about the same percentage as the United States. And it’s not about pedagogical theories and new techniques that look for shortcuts. The educational machine does not need fine-tuning; it needs a complete change of direction. It needs to make students read, read and read. 这不只是资金投入的问题。墨西哥对教育的投入超过国内生产总值(GDP)的5%，和美国大致相当。这也不是教学理论以及寻找捷径的新方法的问题。我们的教育体制不是需要微调；而是需要完全转变方向。它需要让学生们阅读、阅读、再阅读。 But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people got more than a dishwasher’s training. 但也许墨西哥政府还没有准备好应对真正有文化的人民。我们知道，书籍赋予人抱负、憧憬以及尊严感。如果明天我们一觉醒来变得和芬兰人一样教育良好，大街上将会满是愤怒的公民，而我们充满恐惧的政府会自问：这些人从哪里得到了超出洗碗工的教育？ 大卫·托斯卡纳(David Toscana)著有《最后的读者》(The Last Reader)一书。本文最初由西班牙语撰写，由Kristina Cordero译成英文。 翻译：陈亦亭、曹莉 |
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