《乐观的心》节选

For high school students and undergraduate students, intellectual collaboration is the exception rather than the norm. notwithstanding the occasional socalled group project or work with a lab partner, students are usually asked to take tests and write papers on their own, without any help from others. this is a good thing. Just as athletes must develop their own bodies individually, so all of us must develop our own minds. In order to build essential stores of information, develop habits of thought, and come to recognize our own abilities to think and do, we must both endure the frustrations that attend difficult individual work and experience the satisfactions that follow from successful effort.But after we complete our student years, things change. As adults, we far more often find ourselves undertaking tasks in concert with others.That is especially true in experimental scientific research, where we often find giant research teams engaged in hierarchically structured efforts that resemble work teams in the private sector. But it also is becoming more and more true in theoretical domains of science, in the social sciences, and even in the humanities. Today interdisciplinary research teams regularly develop insights that never would have emerged from sets of atomized researchers working in isolation.

对于高中生和本科生来讲,学术合作是特殊活动而不是常规活动。尽管学生们偶尔也会做所谓的小组项目,或与实验伙伴一起工作,但是他们通常会被要求参加测试,独立完成论文,而不能寻求别人的帮助。这是件好事,就像运动员必须自己去强壮体魄,我们也必须自己锻炼心智。为了积累核心的信息储备,养成思考的习惯,并认识到自己思考和付诸行动的能力,我们既要忍受艰难的独立工作带来的挫败感,也要体验获得成功后的满足感。

而当我们结束了学生时代,情况就变了。作为成年人,我们越来越多地发现自己需要与别人合作去完成工作,这种情况在实验科学研究中尤其突出。在这类研究中,我们经常发现超大型的研究团队在不同层面展开合作,这种情形就像私人企业里的工作团队。这种情形在理论科学研究领域、社会科学甚至是人文学科的研究领域也变得越来越明显。如今,跨学科研究团队常常能够获得全新认识,而孤立的个体研究人员绝对做不到。

本书为杰弗里·肖恩·雷蒙先生在康奈尔大学任职期间所发表的演讲集。全书内容结合当今时代发展,包括大学生的学习生活、大学在当今社会的地位和角色、目前世界发展面临的几大挑战以及大学校长的心声四大主题板块。每篇文章采用中英双语对照形式,适于阅读和朗诵。

本章节演讲的对象主要是学生和家长。无论是展望未来还是回首往事,每一篇讲话都谈到做学生的经历,都提出一种特定的立场,论述了接受教育的意义以及过上有道德和精神丰富的生活的意义。

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