托福双语阅读素材：终身学习，知易行难

想要提高托福阅读成绩我们除了需要持之以恒的练习，更需要充分利用各类英语或双语素材做好补充阅读，培养对英语文章的敏感度和熟练度，这一定程度上也可以助力我们的托福写作备考。下面我们来看一篇经济学人关于终身学习的文章。

Technology and education

Lifelong learning

It is easy to say that people need to keep learning throughout their careers. The practicalities are daunting

科技和教育

终身学习

人们需要终身学习，这一点知易行难

WHEN education fails to keep pace with technology, the result is inequality. Without the skills to stay useful as innovations arrive, workers suffer—and if enough of them fall behind, society starts to fall apart. That fundamental insight seized reformers in the Industrial revolution, heralding state-funded universal schooling. Later, automation in factories and offices called forth a surge in college graduates. The combination of education and innovation, spread over decades, led to a remarkable flowering of prosperity.

当教育跟不上技术进步时，就会造成不平等。在创新到来之际，工人如果没有技能使自己对雇主仍然“有用”，他们就会遭殃。而如果落后的工人太多，社会就开始崩塌。这一根本性的洞见极大影响了工业革命时期的改革者，推动了国家资助全民教育的普及。后来，工厂和办公室自动化又引发了大学生人数猛增。教育和创新相辅相成，历经数十年，令繁荣之花耀眼绽放。

Today robotics and artificial intelligence call for another education revolution. This time, however, working lives are so lengthy and so fast-changing that simply cramming more schooling in at the start is not enough. People must also be able to acquire new skills throughout their careers.

今天，机器人和人工智能呼唤又一场教育革命。而这一次，工作生涯如此漫长而又变化迅速，只在人生初期强加更多教育已经不足以应付。人们还必须能在整个职业生涯中获取新技能。

Unfortunately, as our special report in this issue sets out, the lifelong learning that exists today mainly benefits high achievers—and is therefore more likely to exacerbate inequality than diminish it. If 21st-century economies are not to create a massive underclass, policymakers urgently need to work out how to help all their citizens learn while they earn. So far, their ambition has fallen pitifully short.

不幸的是，正如我们本期特别报道所述，目前的终身学习主要是令成功人士受益，因此更可能加剧而非减轻不平等。如果21世纪的经济体不想要产生一个庞大的底层阶级，政策制定者亟需制定措施，帮助国民在谋生的同时学习。而迄今为止，他们的抱负还小得可怜。

Machines or learning

The classic model of education—a burst at the start and top-ups through company training—is breaking down. One reason is the need for new, and constantly updated, skills. Manufacturing increasingly calls for brain work rather than metal-bashing. The share of the American workforce employed in routine office jobs declined from 25.5% to 21% between 1996 and 2015. The single, stable career has gone the way of the Rolodex.

机器还是学习

在青少年时强化学习，之后通过公司培训加以补充，这种传统的教育模式正在失效。原因之一是需要新的技能，而且还要不断更新。制造业越来越多地需要脑力而非蛮力。从1996年到2015年，常规办公职位在美国劳动力中所占的比例从25.5%下降到21%。单一稳定的职业生涯已经像旋转式名片夹一样一去不返了。

Pushing people into ever-higher levels of formal education at the start of their lives is not the way to cope. Just 16% of Americans think that a four-year college degree prepares students very well for a good job. Although a vocational education promises that vital first hire, those with specialised training tend to withdraw from the labour force earlier than those with general education—perhaps because they are less adaptable.

在人生初期让人们接受更高程度的正规教育并非解决之道。仅有16%的美国人认为四年的大学教育足以让学生找到一份好工作。尽管职业教育能确保找到至关重要的第一份工作，但接受专门培训的人往往比接受普通教育的人更早退出劳动大军，可能是因为前者适应性较弱。

At the same time on-the-job training is shrinking. In America and Britain it has fallen by roughly half in the past two decades. Self-employment is spreading, leaving more people to take responsibility for their own skills. Taking time out later in life to pursue a formal qualification is an option, but it costs money and most colleges are geared towards youngsters.

与此同时，在职培训也在萎缩。在美国和英国，在职培训在过去20年里下降了大概一半。自雇人群正在增多，令更多的人要为自己的技能负责。在年纪较大的时候抽出时间获得一个正规的资质是一种选择，但要投入成本，而且大多数院校是针对年轻人开设的。

The market is innovating to enable workers to learn and earn in new ways. Providers from General Assembly to Pluralsight are building businesses on the promise of boosting and rebooting careers. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have veered away from lectures on Plato or black holes in favour of courses that make their students more employable. At Udacity and Coursera self-improvers pay for cheap, short programmes that bestow “microcredentials” and “nanodegrees” in, say, self-driving cars or the Android operating system. By offering degrees online, universities are making it easier for professionals to burnish their skills. A single master’s programme from Georgia Tech could expand the annual output of computer-science master’s degrees in America by close to 10%.

市场正在创新以让工人能够有新的方法学习和赚钱。从General Assembly到Pluralsight，各类供应商纷纷以推动和重启职业生涯的承诺开创业务。大规模开放式在线课程(MOOC)不再讲授柏拉图或黑洞，而向帮助学生就业的课程倾斜。在优达学城(Udacity)和Coursera，进修者付费学习低价的短期课程，获得如自动驾驶汽车或安卓操作系统方面的“微证书”和“纳米学位”。大学也开始提供在线学位，帮助专业人士更方便地提升技能。单是佐治亚理工学院(Georgia Tech)的硕士课程就能把每年美国计算机科学硕士的毕业人数提高近10%。

Such efforts demonstrate how to interleave careers and learning. But left to its own devices, this nascent market will mainly serve those who already have advantages. It is easier to learn later in life if you enjoyed the classroom first time around: about 80% of the learners on Coursera already have degrees. Online learning requires some IT literacy, yet one in four adults in the OECD has no or limited experience of computers. Skills atrophy unless they are used, but many low-end jobs give workers little chance to practise them.

这些革新显示了如何交织工作和学习。但是，如果任其自行发展，这一新生市场将会主要服务那些已经具备优势的人。如果你在年轻时就享受课堂学习，那么日后学习起来也会更容易：在Coursera，大约80%的学生已经拥有学位。在线学习需要一些IT知识，而在经合组织国家里，四分之一的成年人没有或只有很少的计算机经验。技能不用则退，但在很多低端工作中，工人基本没有机会实践技能。

Shampoo technician wanted

If new ways of learning are to help those who need them most, policymakers should be aiming for something far more radical. Because education is a public good whose benefits spill over to all of society, governments have a vital role to play—not just by spending more, but also by spending wisely.

招募洗发师

如果新的学习方式是要帮助那些最需要帮助的人，那么政策制定者应该寻求远为根本性的举措。因为教育是一种公益事业，其益处会延及整个社会，各国政府要发挥重要作用——不仅要增加投入，还得把钱花得明智。

Lifelong learning starts at school. As a rule, education should not be narrowly vocational. The curriculum needs to teach children how to study and think. A focus on “metacognition” will make them better at picking up skills later in life.

终身学习始于学校。一般来说，教育不应该有狭隘的职业性。学生需要从课程中学会如何学习和思考。注重“元认知”将帮助学生日后更好地学习技能。

But the biggest change is to make adult learning routinely accessible to all. One way is for citizens to receive vouchers that they can use to pay for training. Singapore has such “individual learning accounts”; it has given money to everyone over 25 to spend on any of 500 approved courses. So far each citizen has only a few hundred dollars, but it is early days.

但最大的改变是让所有人都能常态化地进行成人学习。一个方法是向国民发放抵用券，可用于支付培训费用。新加坡就有这样的“个人学习账户”。该国向所有25岁以上的国民提供资金，可用来选择学习500种经认可的课程。到目前为止，每个国民只领取了几百美元，但这才刚刚开始。

Courses paid for by taxpayers risk being wasteful. But industry can help by steering people towards the skills it wants and by working with MOOCs and colleges to design courses that are relevant. Companies can also encourage their staff to learn. AT&T, a telecoms firm which wants to equip its workforce with digital skills, spends $30m a year on reimbursing employees’ tuition costs. Trade unions can play a useful role as organisers of lifelong learning, particularly for those—workers in small firms or the self-employed—for whom company-provided training is unlikely. A union-run training programme in Britain has support from political parties on the right and left.

由纳税人付费的课程有可能被浪费。但企业界可以提供帮助，引导人们学习业界所需的技能，并和MOOC及大学院校合作设计有用的课程。企业还可以鼓励员工学习。电信公司AT&T希望员工具备数字技能，它每年支出3000万美元报销员工的学费。工会也可以发挥作用，组织终身学习，尤其是帮助那些小公司的员工或自雇人士，因为这些人不大可能有公费培训的机会。在英国，一个工会组织的培训项目同时得到了左右两派政党的支持。

To make all this training worthwhile, governments need to slash the licensing requirements and other barriers that make it hard for newcomers to enter occupations. Rather than asking for 300 hours’ practice to qualify to wash hair, for instance, the state of Tennessee should let hairdressers decide for themselves who is the best person to hire.

要让所有这些培训有价值，政府需要大力降低执业资格要求以及其他阻碍新人入行的门槛。例如，与其要求有300小时的实习来获得做洗发工的资格，田纳西州应该让理发店自行决定雇谁最好。

Not everyone will successfully navigate the shifting jobs market. Those most at risk of technological disruption are men in blue-collar jobs, many of whom reject taking less “masculine” roles in fast-growing areas such as health care. But to keep the numbers of those left behind to a minimum, all adults must have access to flexible, affordable training. The 19th and 20th centuries saw stunning advances in education. That should be the scale of the ambition today.

并非每个人都能成功应付正在变化的就业市场。受技术颠覆威胁最大的是那些蓝领工人，其中很多人拒绝在医疗护理等快速发展的领域里承担不那么“男子汉”的工作。但是，若要尽量减少因时代改变而落伍的人数，那么所有成年人都必须能够获得灵活而又实惠的培训。在19和20世纪，教育有了令人震惊的进步。今天的抱负应当不逊当年。