THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED (I) By William James

THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED
大学生的社会价值
By William James
威廉·詹姆斯

THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED, by William James, published in McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXX, p.419.Reprinted in Scott and Zeitlin,College Readings in English Prose, New York, MacMillan Company, 1920, pp. 137-144.

William James （1842-1910）, American psychologist and philosopher, the brother of Henry James （1843-1916）, novelist and essayist. In 1890 William James published his epoch-making Principles of Psychology in which the germs of his philosophy are already discernible. His fascinating style, his broad culture and cosmopolitanism made him the most influential American thinker of his day.

Of what use is a college training? We who have had it seldom hear the question raised—we might be a little nonplused to answer it offhand. A certain amount of meditation has brought me to this as the pithiest reply which I myself can give: The best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you is this—that it should help you to know a good man when you see him. This is as true of women's as of men's colleges; but that it is neither a joke nor a one-sided abstraction I shall now endeavor to show.
大学教育有何用途？我们接受了大学教育，但很少听到过这个问题——一时间要给出答案，恐怕多少有些茫然。考虑良久后，我能给出的最为简明扼要的回答就是：大学教育的理想追求，期望为你达成的最佳成就便是——帮助你在遇见贤达时能有知人之明。这句话既适用于男校，也适用于女校；但它绝非戏言，更不是以偏概全的空洞辞藻。

What talk do we commonly hear about the contrast between college education and the education which business or technical or professional schools confer? The college education is called higher because it is supposed to be so general and so disinterested. At the “schools” you get a relatively narrow practical skill, you are told, whereas the “colleges” give you the more liberal culture, the broader outlook, the historical perspective, the philosophic atmosphere, or something which phrases of that sort try to express. You are made into an efficient instrument for doing a definite thing, you hear, at the schools; but, apart from that, you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum, incapable of spreading light. The universities and colleges, on the other hand, although they may leave you less efficient for this or that practical task, suffuse your whole mentality with something more important than skill. They redeem you, make you well-bred; they make “good company” of you mentally. If they find you with a naturally boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so, as a technical school may leave you. This, at least, is pretended; this is what we hear among college-trained people when they compare their education with every other sort. Now, exactly how much does this signify?
有关大学教育和商学院、技校或专科院校教育的差别，我们平常听到的说法是什么样的？大学之所以唤作高等教育，是因为其通识性与非功利性。你被告知，在“院校”中掌握的是一门相对狭窄的实用技能，而“大学”赋予你更加自由的文化、广阔的视野、历史的视角、哲学的氛围，或是类似的词汇描述的东西。你听到的是，院校能让你成为完成特定事项的有效工具；但是仅此而已，就像呛人的原油一样无法传播光亮。大学和学院则不然，尽管它们让你在应对这种或那种实用任务时没那么熟练，但是却向你的整个头脑注入比技能更为重要的东西。它们重新塑造你，让你拥有良好的修养；培养你的心智，让你成为思想上的“知音”。在这里如果你暴露出粗俗不堪的本性，学校不会像技校那样坐视不管。至少表面上看是这样的；这也是从大学里出来的人宣称的大学教育的独到之处。那么，这种说法究竟有多少可信度呢？

It is certain, to begin with, that the narrowest trade or professional training does something more for a man than to make a skilful practical tool of him—it makes him also a judge of other men's skill. Whether his trade be pleading at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing, it develops a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation. He understands the difference between second-rate and first-rate work in his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a good job in his own line, as soon as he sees it; and getting to know this in his own line, he gets a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow, that may, if circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work, clean work, finished work;feeble work, slack work, sham work—these words express an identical contrast in many different departments of activity. In so far forth, then, even the humblest manual trade may beget in one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work generally.
首先，即使是最狭义的职业或专门训练当然也不止培养熟练工那么简单——它还让人能够对他人的才能做出判断。不管是律师、医生、泥瓦匠还是管道工，这些训练让其具备对该项职业的辨别能力。他通晓整个行业中优和劣的差别；在本职工作完成得好时，一眼便知；并且凭借对自身领域的把握，大致地知道优秀到底是什么，在合适的情况下便能举一反三，对其他领域也做出判断。精益求精、干净利落、圆满完成；敷衍了事、消极怠工、漏洞百出——这些词汇表明在众多不同的工作中都有同样的对比。那么，到目前为止，即使是最卑微的手工艺人也可以发挥微小的力量，来判断普遍意义上工作的优劣。

Now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college training? Is there any broader line—since our education claims primarily not to be “narrow”—in which we also are made good judges between what is first-rate and what is second-rate only? What is especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of the “humanities,” and these are often identified with Greek and Latin. But it is only as literatures, not as languages, that Greek and Latin have any general humanity value; so that in a broad sense the humanities mean literature primarily, and in a still broader sense, the study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. Literature keeps the primacy; for it not only consists of masterpieces, but is largely about masterpieces, being little more than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and history. You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, and mechanics are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.
既然如此，我们这些受到高等教育的人应该以什么为本业呢？有没有更宽广的领域——既然我们的教育宣称力避“狭隘”——通过教育我们是否也能够很好地辨别优劣？大学所开设的课程长久以来被称作“人文学”，而所谓人文学往往等同于希腊语和拉丁语。但是希腊语和拉丁语仅仅在作为文学，而非语言的时候，才有普遍的人文价值；因此广义上的人文学主要指文学，继续推而广之，则指对人类在几乎任何领域创造的经典所进行的研究。文学占据首位，是因为文学不仅由杰作组成，在很大程度上也是关于杰作的，若以批评和历史的形式出现，那么简直就是人类伟大成就的欣赏史。你可以借由历史的视角赋予几乎任何事物人文价值。在教学的时候若关注天才们相继取得的科学成就，那么地质学、经济学和力学也可以成为人文学。相反，则会将文学教成语法，艺术教成目录，历史教成日期列表，或是把自然科学变成公式、重量和度量组成的表单。

The sifting of human creations! —nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography; what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part. Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. All our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection on the part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms “better” and “worse” may signify in general. Our critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical. We sympathize with men's mistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we feel that pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we applaud what overcame them.
对人类创造的精挑细选！——我们对人文学的理解必在此之上。从根本上说，这意味着传记；因此我们的大学应当讲授的是传记历史，不仅是政治，而是有关人类努力和成就的任何事物和一切事物。依此展开研究，我们就知道何种活动经受住了时间的检验，从而取得衡量卓越与持久的标准。所有的艺术、科学和机构都不过是人类对完美孜孜不倦的追求；在看到卓越的不同类型，检验的多种多样，适应的灵活变化时，我们就对普遍意义上的“更好”和“更坏”有了更深的理解。批判能力就变得多一分敏锐，少一分偏执。即使在纠正他人的偏误时，也能够将心比心；即使在为胜利的一方喝彩时，也可以对功败垂成和崎岖年代的痛苦感同身受。

Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is unmistakable. What the colleges—teaching humanities by examples which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant—should at least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguises, superiority has always signified and may still signify. The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent—this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labeled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.