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  3. If you have a child entering grade school this fall, file away just one numb

If you have a child entering grade school this fall, file away just one numb

游客2023-12-15  57
问题     If you have a child entering grade school this fall, file away just one number with all those back-to-school forms: 65 percent.
    Chances are just that good that, in spite of anything you do, little Oliver or Abigail won’t end up a doctor or lawyer—or, indeed, anything else you’ve ever heard of. According to Cadry N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.
    So Abigail won’t be doing genetic counseling. Oliver won’t be developing Android apps for currency traders or co-chairing Google’s philanthropic division. Even those digital-age careers will be old hat. Maybe the grown-up Oliver and Abigail will program Web-enabled barrettes or quilt with scraps of Berber tents. Or maybe they’ll be plying a trade none of us old-timers will even recognize as work.
    For those two-thirds of grade-school kids, if for no one else, it’s high time we redesigned American education.
    As Ms. Davidson puts it: "Pundits may be asking if the Internet is bad for our children’s mental development, but the better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future."
    In her galvanic new book, "Now You See It," Ms. Davidson asks, and ingeniously answers, that question. One of the nation’s great digital minds, she has written an immensely enjoyable omni-manifesto that’s officially about the brain science of attention. But the book also challenges nearly every assumption about American education.
    Don’t worry: She doesn’t conclude that students should study Photoshop instead of geometry, or Linux instead of Pax Romana. What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.
    Simply put, we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist. We can’t keep ignoring the formidable cognitive skills they’re developing on their own. And above all, we must stop disparaging digital prowess just because some of us over 40 don’t happen to possess it. An institutional grudge match with the young can sabotage an entire culture.
    When we criticize students for making digital videos instead of reading "Gravity’s Rainbow," or squabbling on Politico.com instead of watching "The Candidate," we are blinding ourselves to the world as it is. And then we’re punishing students for our blindness. Those hallowed artifacts— the Thomas Pynchon novel and the Michael Ritchie film—had a place in earlier social environments. While they may one day resurface as relevant, they are now chiefly of interest to cultural historians. But digital video and Web politics are intellectually robust and stimulating, profitable and even pleasurable.
    The contemporary American classroom, with its grades and deference to the clock, is an inheritance from the late 19th century. During that period of titanic change, machines suddenly needed to run on time. Individual workers needed to willingly perform discrete operations as opposed to whole jobs. The industrial-era classroom, as a training ground for future factory workers, was retooled to teach tasks, obedience, hierarchy and schedules.
    A classroom suited to today’s students should deemphasize solitary piecework. It should facilitate the kind of collaboration that helps individuals compensate for their blindnesses, instead of cultivating them. That classroom needs new ways of measuring progress, tailored to digital times— rather than to the industrial age or to some artsy Utopia where everyone gets an Awesome for effort.
    The new classroom should teach the huge array of complex skills that come under the heading of digital literacy. And it should make students accountable on the Web, where they should regularly be aiming, from grade-school on, to contribute to a wide range of wiki projects.
    As scholarly as "Now You See It" is—as rooted in field experience, as well as rigorous history, philosophy and science—this book about education happens to double as an optimistic, even thrilling, summer read. It supplies reasons for hope about the future. Take it to the beach. That much hope, plus that much scholarship, amounts to a distinctly unguilty pleasure.
                                            From The New York Times, August 7, 2011 [br] In paragraph 8, "sabotage" means______.
选项 A、encumber
B、beat
C、defend
D、repel
答案 A
解析 本题为词义辨析题。根据题干，之前一句And above all，we must stop disparaging digital prowess just because some of us over 40 don’t happen to possess it．这句话说明我们必须停止这种行为，接下来An institutional grudge match with the young can sabotage an entire culture．说的是这种行为的后果。因此可以排除C；B项beat culture没有这个搭配；D项repel culture也不正确。综上所述应选择A。
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