托福阅读材料:聚光灯下的学校选择

　　本文是托福阅读课外读物-School choice in the spotlight. (The Economist) 。托福阅读材料:聚光灯下的学校选择希望对大家托福备考有所帮助。更多精彩尽请关注新东方在线托福网!

　　托福阅读材料:COMPREHENSIVE, public, private, grammar, confessional, free, academy? These words are plain English, but how they hang together would baffle a speaker of (say) Canadian or American English. To anxious British parents, though, they form the well-known lexicon of an agonising test of values and ambitions: choosing a school.

　　“Future Conditional”, playing at London’s Old Vic, is a new play exploring this choice. Six mothers of children at the same state primary school all face the application process for secondary. Any parents in the audience, thinking they are in for a night of relaxing theatre away from the sprogs, will instead experience a squirm-inducing two-hour reminder of all of the painful political, financial and personal compromises required in the choice.

　　For the uninitiated, “public” schools in England are not public schools, but fancy private ones. (Other schools, mysteriously, are also expensive and private but not known as “public”.) “Grammar” schools do not focus on grammar; they are free but selective state schools that cream off bright students from the comprehensive state schools that take all comers. (There are exceptions: Manchester Grammar School is another private institution.) “Free” schools are free of charge, but the name comes from the fact that they are also free from the control of local government. “Academies” are also relatively independent, state-funded schools that may use their own curriculum. Confessional schools may, despite being, say, Catholic, take avowed members of other faiths or of none at all. Got that? Good, because it is all on the exam.

　　The play gets going about a quarter of the way through. Two friends sit at coffee. Niamh, her voice already a high-pitched warble, somehow reaches another octave as she explains to Suzie her sudden change of heart on putting her child forward for private school. Suzie glares silently for minutes on end as Niamh works herself into an ever-higher pitch of self-justification: Suzie, after all, had just begged her friends to sign a pledge to send their kids to the local comprehensive.

　　The problem is one that game theorists would recognise as a classic collective-action dilemma. If Suzie’s kind got her way, mixed but mostly middle-class neighbourhoods would have schools that represented their diverse and striving populations—a liberal dream. But when the first few kids go private, and the next few go to a selective state school, the average ability at the comprehensive falls. That makes it less attractive; the exodus of ambitious families accelerates, and the dynamic gets harder to turn round. Everyone wants good comprehensives, but nobody wants to sacrifice their own kids without a guarantee that others will join them. The six mums’ increasing mistrust and recrimination is “Reservoir Dogs” on the playground: everyone is trying to find the rat.

　　By the end of “Future Conditional”, few of the characters are where they thought they would be. Alas, the play often works better as a seminar than it does as drama. Well-drawn characters, funny set-pieces and telling details (the different mums’ clothes and hairstyles are perfect) are crowded out by declamatory dialogue that feels lifted from opinion columns: the Guardian in the case of a cranky, left-wing, northern bureaucrat on an education-reform committee, and the Telegraph in the case of his braying Etonian/Oxonian antagonist.

　　The children, fittingly enough, are entirely absent in this parental drama, except for one, the student representative on the reform committee. Alia, an impossibly precocious refugee girl, at least has the benefit of outsider status: her incredulity that the system really “works” as it does could stand for that of any newcomer to British class- and mobility-anxiety. Alia offers a simple solution: let the top pupils at every school, whether Eton or a failing comprehensive, be guaranteed admission to Oxford or Cambridge; let the next-ranked pupils at each school take a spot at the next-most competitive universities, and so on. Those from the poorer schools may have lower test scores, but, given their circumstances, they will have actually achieved more than those whose parents stuffed a bassoon into their hands to help their chances at a posh school or university.

　　Alia’s solution has an appeal, not only for the pupils or the university, but for those poor anguished parents. To encourage the kids to do their best is hard enough without trying to game the system at the same time. Such a radical change could not only rebalance parents’ incentives, but the schools’ (and top universities’) populations themselves, striking a blow for meritocracy. But like any radical reform, it faces so many entrenched interests that it is unlikely to get a shot.

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