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。

Updating these criticisms, Mr Beard makes some striking points about the way “total institutions” (a phrase he borrows from the sociologist Erving Goffman) can reconstruct the human personality.

比尔德对这些批评进行了更新，他提出了一些关于“整体制度”（他借用了社会学家欧文·戈夫曼的说法）重建人类人格的不同寻常的观点。

The aim of public schools is to make people fit in effortlessly with the changing rules and rituals of the tribe.

私校的目的是让人们毫不费力地适应部落不断变化的规则和仪式。

They do this by removing children from their natural environments, then forcing them to play a succession of different roles.

他们把孩子从自然环境中带走，然后强迫他们扮演一系列不同的角色。

“We were post-modernism come to life,” he writes. “We had our different ‘I’s’, some more made-up than others, customised as required because we didn’t have the peace or privacy to become ourselves in our own time.”

“我们是苏醒的后现代主义，”他写道。“我们有不同的‘我’，有些是编造出来的，有些是根据需要定制的，因为我们没有那种能让我们在自己的时间做自己的安宁和隐私。”

Thus Alexander Johnson became Boris, Eric Blair became George Orwell, and Philby, Burgess and Maclean became Soviet agents.

于是，亚历山大·约翰逊成了鲍里斯·约翰逊，埃里克·布莱尔成了乔治·奥威尔，菲尔比、伯吉斯和麦克林成了苏联特工。

The author also makes good use of his own memories at Radley College.

作者还很好地利用了自己在拉德里学院的回忆。

The school was trapped in the past, both the 1940s and 1950s — playground games were an endless fight against the Germans — and to some extent the late Victorian era, when the British Empire encompassed much of the globe.

这所学校被困在了过去，1940年代和1950年代——操场游戏就是与德国人无休止的打斗——在某种程度上也是维多利亚时代晚期，当时大英帝国占领了全球大部分地区。

Mr Beard writes movingly about being sent away from home at eight.

比尔德先生动情地描写了他在八岁时被送出家门的经历。

One boy in his year had to be dragged out of the family car, kicking and screaming, as his mother sat sobbing in the front.

一个和他同龄的男孩从家里的车上被拖下来，他又踢又叫，而他的母亲坐在前面哭泣。

All the same, he sometimes tries too hard to condemn the institutions that evidently caused him much misery.

尽管如此，他有时还是过于强烈地谴责了那个显然给他带来了巨大痛苦的体系。

He presents Mr Johnson as the archetype of a public-school man — an entitled and unprincipled bloviator on the surface but, inside, a sad little boy crying for his mother.

他把约翰逊描绘成私校男生的典型——表面上是一个有资格、无原则的傲慢吹嘘者，但内心却是一个哭着要找妈妈的可怜小男孩。

But there is a range of other public-school types, including dutiful swots like Rishi Sunak, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer.

但是还有其他类型的私校学生，包括像英国财政大臣里什·苏纳克这样尽职尽责的人。

And Mr Beard fails to notice the way public schools have reinvented themselves to serve a new plutocratic elite, a group both more sentimental about its children and less tied to the nation state.

比尔德先生没有注意到私校是如何进行自我改造，来为新的财阀精英们服务的，这个群体对自己的孩子更富有感情，与国家的连结更弱。

Today’s public schools are much softer places than Mr Beard remembers.

如今的私学比比尔德先生记忆中的要温和得多。

They pamper their pupils with first-class facilities and are hyper-alert to signs of bullying and emotional distress.

他们为学生提供一流的设施，并对欺凌和情感抑郁的迹象保持高度警惕。

With the notable exception of Eton College, most now take girls.

除了著名的伊顿公学，大多数学校现在都招收女生。

They are also highly globalised (a third of today’s boarders are born abroad) and increasingly enlightened (Eton has a director of inclusion).

它们也变得高度全球化（如今三分之一的寄宿学生出生在国外），并且越来越开明（伊顿公学有一位包容性主管）。

The most pressing question about them today is not whether they produce emotional pygmies who will nevertheless go on to run — and ruin — Britain.

如今，有关私学最紧迫的问题，不是它们是否会培养出继续统治并毁灭英国的情感侏儒。

It is whether they are producing well-adjusted members of the global meritocracy who don’t give a fig for public service.

而是他们是否在培养适应性良好、对公职毫不在意的全球化精英成员。

来源：经济学人