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发表于 2025-2-8 15:00:28
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Not that the West, with all of its supposed advantages, was ever
immune from self-criticism. It was given such in 1907, in a book that remains a classic to this day: The Education of Henry Adams. The book is essentially an autobiography, and so Henry Adams is its shamelessly elite author, perhaps the most Brahminical of Boston Brahmins, a man of Harvard, a man of letters, the descendant of no fewer than two American presidents. He examined in withering detail the matter of American knowledge diffusion, and of how, for him at least, it seemed to have come up wanting.
Henry Brooks Adams was born in 1838 “under the shadow of the Boston State House” on Beacon Hill, and he died in Washington in March 1918. The span of his eighty years was thus prodigious. He was witness to the Civil War, and then to the Great War. He saw President Lincoln’s assassination and the violent overthrows both of the Chinese emperor and the Russian czar. He lived through all of Queen Victoria’s reign. He traveled in a horsedrawn diligence and a stagecoach, and to get from Boston to Washington, DC, before the completion of the railway line, he had to cross the Susquehanna River by steamboat. At the turn of the century he bought himself a motor car, and he was well aware ever since the test flights at Kitty Hawk that the airplane was to be the long-distance transporter of the future. He began his life writing letters by hand, posting them through the mail, and waiting days for a response. At the end, he could send telegrams and hear voices over the airwaves sent wirelessly by what came to be called radio. In his early years, the battleground was dominated by the cannon and flintlock; then came the Hotchkiss machine gun; and by the time he was in his dotage, millions could be mown down by the highly developed weaponry of the new century, and he feared for the future of the world he had once cherished so much, which had seemed to him so much more settled and secure.
The pace of change throughout his life was such, Adams concluded, that no traditional educational system could possibly keep up and provide its charges with the knowledge they required to function in so furious an existence. Hence his criticism of schooling: it was just too slow, too rooted in irrelevance, too little connected to the real world that was happening just outside the schoolroom windows. The only way to keep up, he decided, was to self-educate, to wander, to observe, to read, to ask, to determine an individual path through the ever expanding forest of knowledge. |
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