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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。）