If you were to look at the list of where the last twenty-five Americans to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine got their undergraduate degree,
要是看看获得诺贝尔医学奖的25位美国人毕业的大学名单:
you'll be surprised at what you'd find.
你会因自己的发现大吃一惊
Some of them won to Yale and Columbia and MIT, but some of them also went to DePauw, Holy Cross, and Gettysburg College.
以上的高校有耶鲁,有哥伦比亚,有麻省理工,但也有迪堡,有圣十字,有盖茨堡。
It's a list of good schools, much the same thing holds true for the colleges of the Nobel Prize winners in chemistry.
这就是所谓好学校的列表。同样的也包括下面的近年来摘得诺贝尔化学奖桂冠的25个美国人毕业的高校。
Harvard's on the list with so a lot of schools that we don't think of as the best in the land.
我们并不认为包括哈佛大学在内的列表上的所有学校都是较好的培育人才之地。
To be a Nobel Prize winner, apparently, you have to be smart enough to get into a college
当然,要想获得诺贝尔奖,你的聪明才智最少应该能够保证
that's at least as good as Notre Dame or the University of Illinois. That's all.
自己进入圣母大学或者伊利诺伊大学这个层次的高校。除此之外,别无其他捷径。
This is a radical idea, isn't it?
这种观点是不是比较偏激?
Suppose that your teenage daughter found out that she'd been accepted at two universities, Harvard University and Georgetown University.
假如你十儿岁的女儿发现自己必须在两所大学——哈佛大学和位于华盛顿特区的乔治敦大学之间做出选择,
Where would you want her to go?
你会希望她进入哪所大学?
I'm guessing Harvard, becasue Harvard is a "better" school.
我想你会选择哈佛,因为哈佛是“好”学校。
Its students score a good ten to fifteen percent higher on their SATs,
在美国大学本科标准入学考试(SAT)中,
the dressed up IQ test that virtually all American high school students have to take before applying to college.
只有分数处于前面10%或者15%的学生才可能进入哈佛。
But given what we are learning about intelligence, the idea that students can be ranked, like runners in a race, makes no sense.
但如果按照我们已知的智力方面的知识,像分出跑步运动员的名次一样,对高校进行排名,却是毫无意义的。
Georgetown's students may not be as smart on an absolute scale as the students of Harvard.
从IQ的绝对分值来看,乔治敦大学的学生也许没哈佛大学的学生聪明,
But they are all, clearly, smart enough, and future Nobel Prize winners come from schools like Georgetown as well as from schools like Harvard.
然而毫无疑问的是,他们都是聪明的,跟哈佛的毕业生一样将来获得诺贝尔奖。
The psychologists Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up on their complex admission's process
近来,心理学家贝瑞.史瓦兹呼吁名牌高校放弃他们复杂的入学测试程序,
and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold.
只要让那些达到高校入学标准的学生像抽奖中彩票一样随机选择高校就可以了。
"Put people into two categories, Schwartz says.
“可以把学生分成两个群体,”
"Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected."
史瓦兹说,“够格的和不够格的。够格的人可以被接纳,不够格的人就要拒之门外。”
Schwartz conceits that his idea has virtually no chance of being accepted. But he's absolutely right.
虽然史瓦兹也承认他的想法在现实当中无法被人们接受,但他说的绝对是正确的。
As Hudson writes (and keep in mind that he did his research at elite all-male English Boarding schools in the 1950s and 1960s),
正如哈德森写的那样(记得他在20世纪50年代和60年代之间,曾对英国顶尖的男生寄宿学校进行了调査):
"Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys."
“如果你遇到的了—个真正聪明的小孩,那就完全没有必要知道他的IQ是多少。”