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Text A Another School Year-What For?

John Ciardi

	Let me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher. It was January of 1940 and I was fresh out of graduate school starting my first semester at the University of Kansas City. Part of the student body was a beanpole with hair on top who came into my class, sat down, folded his arms, and looked at me as if to say “All right, teach me something.” Two weeks later we started Hamlet. Three weeks later he came into my office with his hands on his hips. “Look,” he said, “I came here to be a pharmacist. Why do I have to read this stuff?” And not having a book of his own to point to, he pointed to mine w hich was lying on the desk.
	New as I was to the faculty, I could have told this specimen a number of things. I could have pointed out that he had enrolled, not in a drugstoremechanics school, but in a college and that at the end of his course he meant to reachfor a scroll that read Bachelor of Science. It would not read: Qualified PillGrinding Technician. It would certify that he had specialized in pharmacy, but it would further certify that he had been exposed to some of the ideas mankind has generated within its history. That is to say, he had not entered a technical training school but a university and in universities students enroll for both training and education.
	I could have told him all this, but it was fairly obvious he wasntgoing to be around long enough for it to matter.
	Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high sense of duty and I triedto put it this way: “For the rest of your life,” I said,“your days are goingto average out to about twentyfour hours. They will be a little shorter when you are in love, and a little longer when you are out of love, but the average will tend to hold. For eight of these hours, more or less, you will be asleep.”
	“Then for about eight hours of each working day you will,I hope,be usefully employed. Assume you have gone through pharmacy school—or engineering,or law school, or whatever—during those eight hours you will be using your professional skills. You will see to it that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesnt jump the fence, or that your client doesnt go to the electric chair as a result of your incompetence. These are all useful pursuits. They involve skills every man must respect, and they can all bring you basic satisfactions. Along with everything else, they will probably be what puts food on your table, supports your wife, and rears your children. They will be your income,and may it always suffice.”
	“But having finished the days work, what do you do with those other eight hours? Lets say you go home to your family. What sort of family are you raising? Will the children ever be exposed to a reasonably penetrating idea at home? Will you be presiding over a family that maintains some contact with the great democratic intellect? Will there be a book in the house? Will there be a painting a reasonably sensitive man can look at without shuddering? Will the kids ever get to hear Bach?”
	That is about what I said, but this particular pest was not interested. “Look,” he said, “you professors raise your kids your way; Ill take care of my own. Me, Im out to make money.”
	“I hope you make a lot of it,” I told him, “because youre going to bebadly stuck for something to do when youre not signing checks.”
	Fourteen years later I am still teaching, and I am here to tell you that the business of the college is not only to train you, but to put you in touch with what the best human minds have thought. If you have no time for Shakespeare, for a basic look at philosophy, for the continuity of the fine arts, for that lesson of mans development we call history—then you have no business beingin college. You are on your way to being that new species of mechanized savage,the pushbutton Neanderthal. Our colleges inevitably graduate a number of suchlife forms, but it cannot be said that they went to college; rather the college　went through them—without making contact.
	No one gets to be a human being unaided. There is not time enough in a single lifetime to invent for oneself everything one needs to know in order to be acivilized human.
	Assume, for example, that you want to be a physicist. You pass the great stone halls of, say, M.I.T., and there cut into the stone are the names of the scientists. The chances are that few, if any, of you will leave your names to be cut into those stones. Yet any of you who managed to stay awake through part of a high school course in physics, knows more about physics than did many of those great scholars of the past. You know more because they left you what they knew, because you can start from what the past learned for you.
	And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so it is true of mankind's spiritual resources. Most of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books are mans peculiar accomplishment. When you have read a book, you have added to your human experience. Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homers mind. Through books you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—the list is endless. For a great book is necessarily a gift; it offers you a life you have not the time to live yourself, and it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in literal time. A civilized mind is, in essence, one that contains many such lives and many such worlds. If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces ofthe minds of Aristotle, or Chaucer, or Einstein, you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen of a democracy.
	I think it was La Rochefoucauld who said that most people would never fallin love if they hadnt read about it. He might have said that no one would ever manage to become human if they hadnt read about it.
	I speak, Im sure, for the faculty of the liberal arts college and for the faculties of the specialized schools as well, when I say that a university hasno real existence and no real purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in touch, both as specialists and as humans, with those human minds your human mind needs to include. The faculty, by its very existence, says implicitly: “We havebeen aided by many people, and by many books, in our attempt to make ourselves some sort of storehouse of human experience. We are here to make available to you, as best we can, that expertise.”


1 About the author and the text:
	John Ciardi (1916—1986) was an accomplished poet and essayist who was best known for his translation of Dantes Inferno in the United States. The text is adapted from a speech he presented to the College of Men at Rutgers University as anAssociate Professor of English at the opening ceremony of 1954 school year. The essay was first published in the Rutgers Alumni Monthly, November, 1954.
2 Part of the student body was a beanpole with hair on top who came into my class, sat down, folded his arms, and looked at me as if to say “All right, teach me something.” (para.1)
	Here, “as if to say” has the same meaning as “as if he wanted to say”. Besides introducing adverbial clauses of manner, as if can be used in front of toinfinitive, participle, adjective or prepositional phrases. More examples: 　　 Often he [the wolf] would sit with his nose to the sky, turning his head this way and that as if to check the wind. (toinfinitive) (Lesson 2: para.9) 　　 The clock struck midnight, as if to remind him that it was time for bed. (toinfinitive) “He told me that,” he said quietly, as if remembering something he had tried to forget. (participle) 　　 Suddenly, as if by magic, the police dog team came up out of the creek bed, and a man came running toward my fire. (Lesson 2: para. 38) (prepositional phrase) 　　 The boy hung his head, as if in shame. (prepositional phrase) 　　 He threw all the cigarettes into the trashcan as if determined to quit smoking. (adjective)
3. Hamlet (para.1)
	A tragedy written by William Shakespeare. Prince Hamlet of Denmark, called upon by his fathers ghost to avenge his murder, is trapped between thought and action. The story revealed Shakespeares deep understanding of human flaws and became one of the best known in Western culture.
4. faculty (para.2)
	It refers to a department within a university. It is often called “school” too, such as the School of Business, the Law School, the Business School, etc.
5. drugstoremechanics school (para.2)
	The author is making up a name for vocational schools which basically train students for the job market. Drugstoremechanics refers to those who make pills based on instructions and, therefore, do not require much learning. Here the authoris using a rather sarcastic tone to convey his idea that university education is different from vocational school training.
6. Bachelor of Science (para.2)
	Bachelors degree is the first level of university degree. A student majoring in natural science will get a degree of “Bachelor of Science” (BSc) while thosemajoring in liberal arts or humanities will get “Bachelor of Arts” (BA) upon graduation.

7.	...during those eight hours you will be using your professional skills. (para.5)
“Shall/will be doing sth.” is the form of the future continuous tense. It is used for ongoing future actions. More examples: 　　 Will you be presiding over a family that ...? (para.6) 　　 Ill be waiting for you at the eastern gate of the university. 　　 Our classmate Xiao Liang will be appearing on a TV talk show next Tuesday.

8.	They will be your income, and may it always suffice. (para.5)
In formal English, “may” is used to express a hope or wish. More examples: 　　 May our country be prosperous and our people happy. 　　 May peace finally prevail.

9.	Bach (para.6)
Bach (1685—1750) is a German composer. Although he was in his own time chiefly known as an organist, he is now universally recognized as one of the greatest composers in history. Much of Bachs music was religious in inspiration as he wrote more than 200 church cantatas (康塔塔, 一种短小的音乐作品,常带有宗教色彩).

10.	Shakespeare (para.9)
William Shakespeare (1564—1616) is the most famous poet and playwright in the Englishspeaking countries, if not in the world. He is said to have written 39 plays and more than 154 sonnets, many of which have become masterpieces for students of arts and literature all over the world. Some of his most famous and successful plays include Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, Richard III, Henry IV and A Midsummer Nights Dream.

11.	M.I.T. (para.11)
It is the short name for Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Founded in 1861,this private university is located in Cambridge, Mass., USA.

12.	Homer (para.12)
A Greek poet probably of the 8th century BC who was believed to be the author ofIliad and Odyssey, the two earliest epic poems in Greek literature about the Trojan War.

13.	Virgil (para.12)
Virgil (70—19 BC), a great Roman poet, is best known for his epic poems describing the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome.

14.	Dante (para.12)
Alighieri Dante (1265—1321) is an Italian poet. His masterpiece, The Divine Comedy (《神曲》), describes the journey of a religious pilgrim through Hell Purgatory and Heaven. One of the first writers to abandon Latin for the language of the people, Dantes work is viewed as the beginning of Renaissance (文艺复兴时期) .

15.	Chaucer (para.12)
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340—1400), an English poet, established English as a literary language. His most representative work Canterbury Tales provides an excellent source on the life and customs of late medieval England.

16.	Einstein (para.12)
Albert Einstein (1859—1930) was a Germanborn SwissAmerican theoretical physicist, the formulater of the theory of relativity. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 and is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists in histor.

17.	La Rochefoucauld (para.13)
Fransois de La Rochefoucauld (1613—1680) was a French writer of moralist aphorisms, published as Maxims (1665).

18.	... a university has no real existence and no real purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in touch, both as specialists and as humans ... (para.14)
Here, “as it succeeds in ...” is an adverbial clause of purpose. “Except” is often used along with that/when/where/what/as as a conjunction. More examples: 　　 The house stays empty except when its owner comes in summer. 　　 We know nothing about the project except what is reported in the papers.