What We Lose When We Push Our Kids to ‘Achieve’
一个“成绩为上”的社会失去了什么
When I was 12, I disappeared into my bedroom with a $40 folk guitar and a giant book of Beatle songs, with elementary, large-type “E-Z” chord diagrams to follow. I had no musical gift, as a series of failed music lessons had assured me — it was actually the teachers who assured me; the lessons were merely dull — and no real musical training. My fingers stung as I tried to press down on the strings without making them buzz, and my left hand ached as I tried, and for a long time failed, stretching it across the neck. Nonetheless, I worked my way through “Rain” (abbreviated to two chords) and “Love Me Do” (three) and finally “Yellow Submarine” (four chords, or was it five?) and discovered by myself the matchless thrill of homemade musical harmony.
12岁那年，我把自己关在卧室，抱着把40美元的民谣吉他和一本巨大的披头士乐队歌曲谱，跟着谱子上大号字体标注的简易和弦图弹奏。我没有什么音乐天赋，一系列令人感到挫败的音乐课让我明白了这一点——其实是老师向我确认了这一点；这些课只是枯燥罢了——而且我没有受过真正的音乐训练。我一边扫弦，一边努力在按下琴弦的同时不发出杂音，我试图让左手横跨整个琴颈，试了很久也没成功，手倒是弄疼了。尽管如此，我还是努力完成了《Rain》（两个和弦的简易版）和《Love Me Do》（三个和弦），最后是《Yellow Submarine》（不记得是四个还是五个和弦），我发现了自己制造和谐音律带来的无与伦比的快乐。
No one asked me to do this, and surely no one was sorry the door was closed as I strummed and stumbled along after the nirvana of these simplified songs. But the sense of happiness I felt that week — genuine happiness, rooted in absorption in something outside myself — has stayed with me.
没有人要求我这么做，当然也没有人因为我关上门而听不到用磕磕绊绊的扫弦声音演奏的简化版歌曲而感到遗憾。但我在那一周感受到的幸福感一直伴随着我——那是真正的幸福感，一种根植于对外界事物的沉迷。
Fifty years later, I am still not a very good guitar player, but that week’s work, and the months and years of self-directed practice on the instrument that followed it, became a touchstone of sorts for me and a model and foundation for almost every meaningful thing I’ve done since. It gave me confidence, often wavering but never entirely extinguished, that perseverance and passion and patience can make one master any task.
50年后，我仍然不是一个很好的吉他手，但那一周的努力——以及随后数月和数年对乐器的自主练习——成为我的一块试金石，也成为我后来几乎每一件有意义的事情的模式和基础。它让我有信心——虽然常常动摇，但从未完全熄灭——相信毅力、兴趣和耐心能够让人搞定任何任务。
So it seems suitable at this season, as the school year ends and graduates walk out into the world, most thinking hard about what they might do with their lives, to talk about a distinction that I first glimpsed in that room and in those chord patterns. It’s the difference between achievement and accomplishment.
我在那个房间里、在那些和弦中第一次体验到了一种与众不同的感觉，在这个毕业季，随着学年的结束和毕业生走向世界，大多数人都在认真思考他们应该做什么的时候，谈一谈这种与众不同的感觉似乎恰合时宜。它是成绩与成就之间的区别。
Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.
成绩是完成外部强加的任务——奖励通常是去往下一个成绩的路径。成就是我们所选择的某种活动的终点，我们将自己融入其中，其奖励是突然的满足感，一种因沉浸于某个我们自己以外的事物而升起的独特的幸福感。
Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote work of achievement. All our observation tells us that young people, particularly, are perpetually being pushed toward the next test or the “best” grammar school, high school or college they can get into. We invent achievement tests designed to be completely immune to coaching, and therefore we have ever more expensive coaches to break the code of the noncoachable achievement test. (Those who can’t afford such luxuries are simply left out.) We drive these young people toward achievement, tasks that lead only to other tasks, into something resembling not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with another hit of sugar water awaiting around the bend but the path to the center — or the point of it all — never made plain.
我们的社会常常达成一种合谋，贬低成就感，支持以死记硬背获取成绩。我们所有的观察都告诉我们，尤其是年轻人，他们一直被推动参加下一次考试或进入他们能考到的“最好”的文法学校、高中或大学。我们发明的成绩测试让启发辅导派不上用场，因此我们有了更昂贵的辅导师，以破解不可辅导的成绩测试的密码。(那些买不起这种奢侈品的人被排除在外。)我们推动这些年轻人取得成绩，这些任务只会指向其他的任务，与其说是激烈竞争，不如说更像是走迷宫，在下一个转弯处获得一大勺糖水奖励，但通往中心的道路——或这一切的意义——从来没有明确。
My own accomplishment of learning those Beatles songs seems to echo in the experience of almost everyone I know. My wife recalls learning to sew her own clothes by the same process I undertook — breaking it down into small, manageable tasks, getting the pattern, choosing the fabric, working the machine, until you find yourself making something like music — in the clothing maker’s case, wearing that beautiful thing you’ve made. The experience of breaking down and building up that she learned then informed her later professional work as a film editor and producer.
我自己学习披头士歌曲的成就似乎与我认识的几乎所有人的经历相呼应。我的妻子回忆说，她学会自己缝制衣服的过程与我的经历相似——把工作分解成小的、可控的任务，打板，选择面料，操作机器，直到你发现自己在制作像音乐一样的东西——对制衣者来说，就是穿上你制作的美丽衣衫。她当时学到的解构和建构的经验为她后来作为电影剪辑和制片的专业工作提供了参考。
Sometimes the process actually produces a vocation: Another friend recalls struggling to draw anything as a kid — Superman, Spider-Man — and being astonished by his own growing skill as each week one more piece of the world got decrypted on paper. He became a realist painter. But most often these early self-directed obsessions produce not a job to earn from but a platform to leap from — they produce a sense of fulfillment through passionate perseverance that crosses over into the most seemingly alien enterprises.
这样的过程有时还能萌生出一个人的职业：我的另一个朋友回忆说，他小时候画什么都画不好——超人、蜘蛛侠——他每周都会画一幅画，将世界的一隅呈现在纸上，他为自己不断进步的画技感到惊讶。他后来成为一名写实画家。但大多数情况下，这些早期的自发引导的痴迷萌生出的不是一份为了赚钱的工作，而是一个用于突破的平台——在富有激情的坚持中，它们带来了一种成就感，这种成就感跨界进入了看上去几乎毫不相关的事业中。
As a parent now, I’ve seen the pure satisfaction of accomplishment, of a particular passion arduously pursued, arise in my own children. Yet I’ve also seen it actively discouraged by the well-meaning schools they attended: More than a decade ago, my then 12-year-old son, Luke, a boy enchanted by Dai Vernon’s card tricks, a pack forever in his hands, found that the many hours he’s spent learning the Erdnase color change was not a necessarily rewarded act in eighth grade. I fought a good fight on his behalf to cut down on homework — a fight that landed eventually on the front page of this newspaper — exactly because homework was cutting into his magic.
作为一名家长，我已经在我自己的孩子身上看到了这一点，纯粹地满足于对某个特定兴趣的勤奋追求带来的成就感。然而，我也看到他们所就读的学校主动善意地劝阻他们：十多年前，我的儿子卢克当时12岁——一个被戴·福农的纸牌魔术迷住的男孩——他手里总拿着一副纸牌，花了很多时间学习艾德内斯的纸牌变色戏法，但八年级的他并没有因此得到老师的认可。我为他打了一场漂亮仗，替他减少了家庭作业，因为家庭作业妨碍了他练习魔术，这一仗后来上了本报头版的报道。
I may have been naïve, but I was, surely, not wholly wrong; the steps he has taken in life that led him eventually to pursue graduate degrees in philosophy began in the pursuit of those illusions. The concentration and subtlety of mind required to master Wittgenstein’s gnomic parables puzzles can be rooted more readily in the art of “twisting the aces” than in getting straight A’s. Self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may look to outsiders or how partial it may be, can become a foundation of our sense of self and of our sense of possibility. Losing ourselves in an all-absorbing action, we become ourselves.
也许我的做法很天真，但肯定至少有做得对的地方；他的人生一步步走向他最终追求的哲学研究生学位，就是从追求这些魔术开始的。掌握维特根斯坦的格言寓言谜题需要注意力和敏锐的心智，这些更容易从“4A反转”的戏法里孕育，而非全A的成绩里。自我导向的成就，无论在外人看来多么荒谬，或者多么片面，都可以成为我们自我感知的基础，以及让自己感到充满了可能。在一件全神贯注的事情中失去自我，我们就成为了自己。
I know there are objections to his view: At some moment, all accomplishment, however self-directed, has to become professional, lucrative, real. We can’t play with cards or chords forever. And surely many of the things that our kids are asked to achieve can lead to self-discovery; taught well, they may learn to love new and unexpected things for their own sake. The trick may lie in the teaching. My sister Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and author, puts this well: If we taught our kids softball the way we teach them science, they would hate softball as much as they hate science, but if we taught them science as we teach them softball, by practice and absorption, they might love both.
我知道有人会反对他的观点：无论如何自我引导，到了某个时刻，所有的成就都必须成为专业的、有利可图的、实质的东西。我们不可能永远玩牌或弹和弦。而且，我们的孩子被要求做到的许多事情肯定也会引出自我发现；教得好，他们可能会自发地学会喜欢上新的和意想不到的东西。诀窍可能在于怎么教。我的姐姐艾莉森·戈普尼克是一位发展心理学家兼作家，她说得很好：如果我们用教科学的方式来教孩子们打垒球，他们会像讨厌科学一样讨厌垒球，但如果我们像教垒球一样教他们科学，通过练习和吸收，他们可能会同时喜欢这两种东西。
Another objection is that accomplishment is just the name people of good fortune give to things that they have the privilege of doing, which achievement has already put them in a place to pursue. But this is to accept, unconsciously, exactly the distinction between major and minor, significant and insignificant tasks, that social coercion — what we used to call, quaintly but not wrongly, “the system” — has always been there to perpetuate.
另一个反对意见是，成就只是幸运者对他们有幸从事的事情的称呼，他们已经获得的成绩使他们处于一个可以追求成就的位置。但这正是无意识地接受了主要和次要、重要和无足轻重的工作之间的区别，接受社会胁迫——我们过去离奇地称之为“体制”，这也没错——始终存在并会持续存在。
Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent. There are many drugs that we swallow or inject in our veins; this is one drug that we produce in our brains, and to good effect. The hobbyist or retiree taking a course in batik or yoga, who might be easily patronized by achievers, has rocket fuel in her hands. Indeed, the beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may do poorly can produce the sense of absorption, which is all that happiness is, while persisting in those we already do well does not.
坚持不懈并饱含激情地追求一项有阻力的工作，无论在什么年龄，即使只是一段短暂的时光，也会产生一种无与伦比的认知鸦片。有很多药物我们口服或注射到血管里；但有一种药物是我们在大脑中产生的，并且起到很好的作用。参加巴迪克蜡染或瑜伽课程的爱好者或退休人士，与高手相比，也许会觉得技不如人，但他们拥有无限的驱动力。当然，这里有一个美妙的悖论，追求我们可能做得不好的事情能够带来这种沉浸的感受，而快乐无非就是这样，坚持做那些我们已经做得不错的事情却不会带来这种感觉。
The pursuit of accomplishment, what I call the real work, never ends and always surprises. I learned in that chord-building week so long ago that if you simply lifted one finger from the C chord, you got the most tender and poignant harmony. I didn’t know then that it was a major seventh chord, favorite of the bossa-nova masters, but I later learned that Paul McCartney, like me, didn’t know that’s what it was, either, when he first made the shape and referred to it simply as “the pretty chord.” From the most gifted to the least, we are brothers and sisters in the pursuit of accomplishment and our stubborn self-propelled decoding of its mysteries. That’s our real human achievement.
追求成就——我认为这是真正的工作——从来没有尽头而且常常带来惊喜。在很久以前学习和弦的那一周，我发现，如果你从C和弦移开一根手指，你就得到了最柔和而悲伤的和声。我那时并不知道这就是巴萨诺瓦大师们最爱的大七和弦，但我后来得知，保罗·麦卡特尼和我一样，在他第一次弹出来并将其称作“漂亮和弦”时，他也不知道那是大七和弦。从最有天赋的到最缺乏天赋的，我们都是在追求成就路上的兄弟姐妹，坚持不懈地自发地去探索它的神秘。这就是我们作为人的真实成就。
来源：好英语网
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