閱讀理解
The case for college has been accepted without question for more than a generation.All high school graduates ought to go, because college will help them earn more money, become “better” people, and learn to be more responsible citizens than those who don’t go.
But college has never been able to work its magic for everyone.And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don’t fit the pattern are becoming more and more obvious.College graduates are selling shoes and driving taxis; college students get in the way of each other’s experiments and write false letters of recommendation in the competition for admission to graduate school.Others find not interested in their studies, and drop out-often encouraged by college leaders.
Some observers say the fault is with the young people themselves-they are spoiled and they are expecting too much.But that is to blame the students as a whole, and does not explain all campus unhappiness.Others blame the state of the World, and they are partly right.We’ve been told that young people have to go to college because our economy cannot take in an army of untrained eighteen-year-olds.But disappointed graduates are learning that it can no longer take in an army of trained twenty-two-year-olds, either.
Some adventuresome educators and campus watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the completion of high school.We may have been looking at all those surveys upside down, it seems, and thinking of the rosy glow of our own remembered college experiences.Perhaps college does not make people intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, or quick to learn things-maybe it is just the other way round, and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are only the ones who have been attracted to college in the first place.And perhaps all those successful college graduates would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not.This is heresy(異端邪說(shuō))to those of us who have been brought up to believe that if a little schooling is good, more has to be much better.But opposite evidence is beginning to mount up.
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