2021年经济学人 英国私立学校还在培养情感侏儒吗？(1)（在线收听）

Books and Arts- Book Review

文学与艺术——书评

Class and Education - Noblesse Disoblige

阶级与教育——贵族的不满

Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England. By Richard Beard.

《可悲的小大人：私立学校与英格兰的毁灭》作者：理查德·比尔德。

As its subtitle promises, this book is an uncompromising denunciation of Britain’s private schools.

正如副标题所显示的那样，这本书坚定地谴责了英国的私立学校。

They offer their charges a Faustian bargain, says Richard Beard: the tools of success (principally fluency and self-confidence) in return for emotional impoverishment.

理查德·比尔德说，这些学校向学生提供了一种浮士德式的交易：用成功的工具（主要是语言流利和自信）换取情感上的贫乏。

He knows whereof he speaks: in 1975 he was sent from home to a new life sleeping in dormitories and climbing hierarchies, much like David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

他清楚自己在说什么：1975年，他被家里人送到学校，过上一种新的生活，睡在宿舍里，攀级而上，就像大卫·卡梅伦和鲍里斯·约翰逊那样。

This argument is far from original; lambasting public schools for tormenting their inmates and ruining the country is one of Britain’s oldest traditions.

这一论点绝不是原创；痛斥私校（public school）折磨囚犯般的学生及破坏国家是英国最古老的传统之一。

(In England and Wales private schools are confusingly known as “public schools”; they themselves prefer “independent schools”.)

（在英格兰和威尔士，私立学校被称为“public schools”，令人困惑；学校更喜欢称自己是“independent schools”。)

Thomas Macaulay, a Victorian historian and politician, avoided them after a family friend told his mother that “throwing boys headlong into those great public schools always puts me in mind of the practice of the Scythian mothers, who threw their new-born infants into the river.”

维多利亚时代的历史学家和政治家托马斯·麦考利没有去上私校，因为家族中的一位朋友告诉他母亲，“把男孩轻率地扔进那些名声很大的私校，总是让我想起塞西亚母亲们把刚出生的婴儿扔进河里的行为。”

In the 20th century Evelyn Waugh quipped that “anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.”

在20世纪，伊夫林·沃曾打趣说：“任何上过英国私校的人都能在监狱里过得相对自在。”

Goronwy Rees, a journalist, wrote of the public-school boys he encountered at Oxford that they “were all well-taught at school and what they understood they understood very well; what they did not understand included almost everything which would change the world in their lifetime”.

记者戈隆威·里斯在谈到他在牛津遇到的私校男孩时写道，他们“在学校里都受到了很好的教育，他们所懂得的东西他们都理解得很好；而他们不懂的几乎包括在他们一生中会改变世界的所有事情。”

Two of the best books about the classic public school (both by T.C. Worsley, a former schoolmaster) are entitled “Barbarians and Philistines” and “Flannelled Fool”.

关于经典私校的两本最好的书（都是前校长T.C.沃斯利写的）是《野蛮人与非利士人》和《穿法兰绒的傻瓜》。