I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that -- being honest about what was going well, what wasn't, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don't get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
上周我寫了一封信給基金會,談論關於其工作內容的事, 並且分享一些問題。 華倫巴菲特(Warren Buffet)建議我那麼做, 如實地談論好的部份與不好的部份, 並且以年會的方式承現出來。 我希望能吸引更多人投入解決這些問題的工作上, 因為我認為這些問題非常重要, 並且需要大家的共同參與。 市場無法操控科學家、 傳播者、思想家與政府官員們 去做正確的事情。 我們必須關注這些事情, 並且讓關心此事的英才吸引更多其他的人加入, 才能為我們所面對的問題帶來進步。
So this morning I'm going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born -- so, more -- and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It's a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
所以今天早上,我將與大家分享其中兩個問題, 並且談論他們的現況。 但是在我進入這些話題之前,我必須向大家承認我是個極為樂觀的人。 任何棘手的問題我都認為有辦法去解決。 而其中之一的原因是我認為我們可以由過去的經驗求得解答。 在上一個世紀,人們的平均壽命延長了近一倍。 另外的一項統計,這大概是我最喜歡的部份, 就是檢視孩童的死亡率。 在1960年代,1.1億的孩童出生, 有2千萬孩童未滿5歲就夭折。 五年前,1.35億的孩童出生,比過去還多, 然而未滿5歲就夭折的不到1千萬。 由這兩點數據我們可看出孩童的死亡率降低了。 這只是個表面上的現象。 每一個被挽救的生命都充滿意義。
And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that's doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there's only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
其中重要的因素並不只是人們收入增加, 還有幾個重要的核心技術的突破: 疫苗被大量且廣大使用。 例如麻疹曾造成400萬人失去生命, 在最近的1990年至今, 而今這個數字已低於40萬以下。 所以我們真的可以創造改變。 下一個關鍵技術的突破可以把1千萬夭折兒童的數量再減半, 我還認為在20年之後我們可以做得更好, 為甚麼呢? 現在只有一些少數的疾病 會造成高致死率, 這些病是腹瀉、肺炎與瘧疾。
So that brings us to the first problem that I'll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that's spread by mosquitos?
所以這引導出今天早上的第一個問題, 我們如何阻止蚊蟲散佈這些致命的疾病呢?
Well, what's the history of this disease? It's been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it's the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn't know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that's why the death rate did come down.
這些疾病的歷史為何? 這些疾病是已存在數千年的重症。 事實上,假如我們看一下遺傳基因, 它是唯一引起基因突變的疾病 住在非洲的人們 為了避免瘧疾導致死亡,已經發展出幾種防治的方法。 在1930年代死亡率人數最高曾超過5百萬人。 這真是個很大的數字, 而且這種疾病傳遍全球。 它是個可怕的疾病。它出現在美國,也出現在歐洲。 但在20世紀之前人們都不知道病因,直到1900年初期, 一位英國的士兵發現了蚊子才是元兇。 所以它造成大流行。 有兩種工具能幫助降低死亡率, 一種是靠DDT來殺死蚊子。 另外一種是利用奎寧或者類奎寧這種藥品來治療病患。 這也是為甚麼這疾病的致死率迅速下降的原因。
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it's everywhere. 1945, it's still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you've gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it's just around the equator.
但現在諷刺的是, 瘧疾在溫帶地區幾乎被消滅, 正是富裕國家的所在地。 所以我們可以看到,1900年全世界飽受瘧疾的困擾, 到了1945年,它仍然肆虐大多數地區。 到了1970年,美國與歐洲大部份的國家已經擺脫瘧疾了。 1990年時,北半球的國家幾乎都已經免除瘧疾的威脅。 到今天你只能到赤道附近的國家才能看到這類的疾病。
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn't get much investment. For example, there's more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it's a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that's why that priority has been set.
這指出一項矛盾的事, 只有在貧困的國家中才會受到這疾病的肆虐, 所以它缺乏投資。 例如投入研發治療禿頭的資金, 就超過瘧疾。 當然禿頭很可怕, (笑聲) 富人們飽受其苦。 這也是為甚麼它比投資瘧疾還來得重要。
But, malaria -- even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can't get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There's no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
但是, 瘧疾每年可以奪走上百萬生命 所造成的影響還不只如此。 超過2億人口每刻都受到它的威脅, 所以在瘧疾流行的區域,經濟是無法得到發展的, 因為它實在是影響太大了。 當然,瘧疾是由蚊子傳播的。 我帶了一些到現場,就是希望大家可以也體驗一下子。 我們可以一起在這個會場中聽一下它們的嗡嗡聲。 (笑聲) 沒有理由只讓窮人們體驗這種感覺 (笑聲) (鼓掌) 放心,這些蚊子並沒有帶有瘧疾。
So we've come up with a few new things. We've got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can't get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that's happened now in a number of countries. It's great to see.
我們已經有一些新的方法。例如蚊帳。 蚊帳非常有用。 當晚上母親和小孩待在蚊帳內, 那麼叮人的蚊子就沒輒了。 當你在室內噴灑DDT 並和蚊帳一起使用, 可以使致死率降低超過一半。 現在已經有許多國家可以做到了, 這真是太棒了。
But we have to be careful because malaria -- the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that's where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you'll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn't pay attention.
但是我們仍然要小心虐疾, 因為寄生蟲和蚊子都在進化。 過去我們用來對付瘧疾的工具到最後都有可能失效。 最後只有兩條路可以選擇, 帶著正確的工具和正確的方法到一個國家, 並衝滿活力地去執行防疫工作, 那麼你可以做到局部的根除, 使瘧疾流行範圍被縮小在地圖上的某一部份。 或者,如果你是半推半就地去從事防疫工作, 一段時間內你可以降低人們對這疾病的負擔, 但是最後這些工具將會失效, 致死率又會回到之前的高峰。 這兩種情況都曾經世界上發生過。
Now we're on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There's new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that's going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it's effective. So we're going to have these new tools.
現在我們正處於這種疾病的上升期, 蚊帳的資助量在增加, 新的藥物正在進行研發。 我們的基金會正在支持一項已經進入第三期實驗的疫苗工作, 並在兩個月之後可以開始使用。 如果有效的話將可以拯救超過2/3的生命。 所以我們即將擁有這樣新的工具。
But that alone doesn't give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I'm quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
但是這些個工具能不足以替我們指出一條新的道路。 因為在消滅這些疾病的道路之上 包含太多的事了。 它需要透過溝通者來確保投資充的, 將它盡量透明化, 並且傳播成功的故事。 它還需要社會科學家 來協助我們指導,不只是70%人們去使用蚊帳, 而是90%的人們。 我們需要數學家來幫助建立數值模型, 例如蒙地卡羅方法(Monte Carlo)來讓我們更加瞭解這些工具相互配合後所得到的作用為何。 當然我們需要藥廠給我們專業的協助。 我們還需要富國的政府能慷慨地資助這些活動。 當這些條件都具備了, 我才能非常的樂觀 看待我們能夠根除瘧疾這件事。
Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I'd say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we'd understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don't. Let's start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I'll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That's part of the reason we're here today, part of the reason we're successful. I can say that, even though I'm a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
現在讓我們轉到第二個問題上面, 一個與前一個問題毫無相關的問題,但同樣很重要, 這問題就是 : 如何創造一位好的老師。 這個問題看起來似乎要我們費很多的時間去思考, 但是我們卻很容易理解這問題。 但是事實上,真的,我們並不瞭解這樣的問題。 就讓我先說說為甚麼這個問題那麼的重要。 我敢說在座的各位都曾經被好的老師教導過, 我們也都受過很好的教育。 這也是為甚麼我們今天坐在這裡的原因, 也是我們為甚麼成功的部分原因。 甚至可以這樣說,我雖是個大學沒畢業的中輟生, 但仍有很棒的老師教導過我。
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
事實上,美國的教育系統運作得還不錯。 在少數地方聚集了有影響力的老師。 所以排名前20%的學生得到了好的教育。 而那前20%的學生成為了這世界上的精英, 與其它世上其它國家前20%的學生相比, 美國前20%的精英學生創造並引領了軟體工業與生物科技的革命, 並使美國站在世界的前峰。
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it's getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
現在,這些前20%精英們的能量, 相對於之前來說已經開始漸漸消失, 但取而代之的是人們關注於是否可得到這些教育的平衡性。 而這種平衡性的減弱,卻要比整體教育體制的減弱還更強。 假如你看經濟領域就可以發現,現在得到好工作機會的人 都是受過較好的教育。 這亟需改變。 我們需要做改變才能讓每個人都得到平等的機會, 這樣國家才會變強大, 並且在各領域繼續保持名列前茅: 與高等教育相關的, 例如科學與數學。
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren't tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it's over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you're low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair.
當我第一次看到統計數字時 我真被這糟糕的現況給嚇到了。 超過30%的學生無法完成他們高中學業。 而且這個數據還是長期被低估的, 因為在統計輟學率時它只是 比對當年升上高三的學生數量與完成高三學業學生的數量, 所以它不包含高三前的學生狀況, 但是大多數的輟學都在高三前就發生了, 輟學率被大大的低估了。 如果將高三前的資料列入統計, 輟學率一定超過30%。 對於少數民族的學生來說,輟學率甚至超過50%。 即使完成了高中學業, 如果來自低收入家庭, 那麼將只有25%的機會可以完成大學學位。 在美國如果你是低收入戶的話, 那麼你進監獄的機會, 反而高於你獲得大學學位。 這完全不公平。
So, how do you make education better?
所以我們該如何改善我們的教育系統呢?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There's many people working on it. We've worked on small schools, we've funded scholarships, we've done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile -- the very best -- and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class -- based on test scores -- by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.
過去九年來,我們的基金一直投資在這上面。 有許多人為此努力地工作著。 我們做小型的學校, 我們提供獎學金, 我們幫忙修建圖書館。 諸多此類的事情都造成不錯的效果。 但隨著我們了解愈深,我們就會瞭解到擁有偉大的老師 是一件重要的事。 我們曾經聯繫一些 致力於研究師資差異性的人, 譬如說那些位於頂尖1/4的師資們 和那些最差的1/4之間的差距, 以及同校內或者跨校間老師的差異有多少呢? 這差異會讓你難以置信。 頂尖的那1/4的師資將會提高他們班上學生的教育水準, 當你用分數去衡量的話, 短短的一年內就可以提高10%。 這代表著甚麼意義嗎? 這表示假如全美國在兩年之內, 全部由這頂尖的1/4師資授課, 那麼美國與亞洲的的教育差距將不復存在。 在四年之內,我們的教育水準將超過世界上的任何一個國家。
So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you'd say, "Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they're doing and transfer that skill to other people." But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
所以很簡單,我們唯一需要的就是這1/4的頂尖師資。 也許你們會那麼說「喔,我們應該獎勵這些人。 要留住這些人。 我們應該要研究他們的教學方式並傳授給其它人。」 但是我可以跟您說,這些事情直一件也沒有發生。
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master's degrees. They've gone back and they've gotten their Master's of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there's no effect at all, is a master's degree.
這頂尖1/4的師資具有怎樣的特性呢? 他們看起來是甚麼樣的呢? 你也許認為這些老師是相當的資深。 但是你錯了。 在經過最初三年的教學之後, 這些老師的教學品質就不會有太大的改變了。 即使有,這些改變也非常的小。 你或許會認為這些老師都有碩士學位。 他們都曾經回到大學去拿到教育學的碩士學位。 這邊有個圖表說明了4個不同的因素, 並且解釋其各自與教學品質之間的關聯性。 最下面的這一條,說明了與教學品質最無關的 就是碩士學位。
Now, the way the pay system works is there's two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master's degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there's a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it's your past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability -- or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
現今的薪資系統看重的是兩樣東西, 一是資歷。 因為你需要把加薪的工資存入你的養老金中。 另外一件就是用額外的錢鼓勵員工去讀碩士學位。 但這些獎勵和成為一個更好的老師都沒有關聯。 對於教美洲文化的老師來說,經由激勵而產生的影響相當小。 對於主修數學的數學老師則產生較大的影響。 但是真正具有壓倒性影響力的,還是以往的表現。 有些人擅長於自我激勵。 但是我們至今仍無法 研究這種自我激勵的本質 並且複製和推廣它, 從而提高整體的教學實力, 或者鼓勵具有此能力的人留在教學領域之中。
You might say, "Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher's leave?" The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it's a system with very high turnover.
你可能會說:「好的老師留下來了,而不好的老師離開了嗎?」 實際上卻是平均水準較高的老師離開了。 而且教育系統的人員流動率本來就很高。
Now, there are a few places -- very few -- where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It's an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools -- mostly middle schools, some high schools -- and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They're team teaching. They're constantly improving their teachers. They're taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, "Hey, you caused this amount of increase." They're deeply engaged in making teaching better.
現在只有少數、非常少數的地方在打造好的師資。 其中就有一間特許學校,名為KIPP, 它的意思是「知識就是力量。」 這真是難以置信。 他們擁有66所學校,大多數是國中,一些是高中, 在這些學校中進行著良好的教學活動。 他們招收最貧困的學生, 並且其中的96%的學生到最後都拿到了大學的學位。 這些學校的教學精神與態度 與普通的公立學校大不相同。 他們採取團隊的教學,並且持續著提高老師的水準。 他們收集數據,也就是學生考試分數, 並且用這些與老師們說「哇,你讓學生們的成績提升了那麼多」 這些學校正在全力提高師資教學水準。
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, "What is going on?" The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, "I'm in the sports rally or something. What's going on?" And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years -- fifth through eighth grade -- keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn't want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
當你親身到這些教室去體驗一下, 剛開始你會覺得很奇妙。 我坐在教室裡卻不停的想:到底發生了甚麼事? 老師在教室內跑來跑去,這裡充滿著教學活力。 我想著:我們是在上體育課嗎? 到底怎麼了? 老師不斷掃視學生,看有誰不專心了, 有誰覺得無聊了, 並且急促地叫學生們上黑板寫東西。 這樣的環境充滿著活力, 因為在中學時期,特別是5到8年級, 這種氛圍很容易 讓學生們全心地投入課堂之中, 沒有人會被取笑或者讓學生產生厭學的情況。 每一個人都得參與其中。 這就是KIPP正在做的事。
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren't told how good they are. The data isn't gathered. In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom -- sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, "Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment."
那與一般的學校比較起來呢? 一般的學校裡沒有人會告訴你這的老師有多好。 這些數據也都沒有被收集起來。 在老師的工作合約之中, 明文限制了校長進入教室的次數, 有時一年只有一次, 而且還要提前發通知。 試著想像一下在工廠之中你擁有一群員工, 其中一些人只是做了一些廢工, 另外經理被告知「喂,你一年只能來這裡看一次, 但是你需要提前讓我們知道,因為我們可能把你弄糊塗, 當你來的時後我們會把工作表現得很美好。」
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn't have the tools to do it. They don't have the test scores, and there's a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that's sort of working in the opposite direction. But I'm optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
即使老師們想要提高教學水準時,他們沒有工具, 他們沒有學生的考試成績, 他們擁有的只是整個組織都在矇蔽這些分數。 例如,紐約通過了一項法令: 用於提升教學水平的資料不能被拿來做為評估老師的依據, 決定一位老師是否繼續留任。 可見整個系統都走錯了方向。 但是我還是很樂觀的看待這事, 我認為還是有些明確的事是我們應該做的。
First of all, there's a lot more testing going on, and that's given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who's doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, "OK, here's a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here's a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me -- when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?" And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.
首先,還有許多的測試持續在進行, 這幫助我們了解我們的處境。 這也讓我們瞭解到誰做得好, 把他們找出來,並且分析他們的教學技巧。 當然,數位攝影機現在很便宜。 在教室之中放個幾台攝影機 並且跟老師們說這些攝影機將會持續錄下他們的上課內容, 這些都是可以在所有公立學校中做到的。 過了幾個星期之後,可以讓這些被攝影的老師們坐下來看這些影像, 他們會說:「這裡我覺得我做得不錯, 而這裡我覺得做得不好, 給我一些建議,如果這學生再鬧事的話,我應該要怎麼處理?」 然後大家可以坐在一起並且互相討論解決方法。 你就可以打造最好的老師群,並且註記一些內容, 讓每個人知道哪些老師擅長教學。
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who's behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
你可以把這些優秀的課程內容錄製成影像, 這樣學生們在外出時就可以看物理課錄影並且學習。 假如有一些學生成績暫時落後了, 那麼你可以把這些錄影課程給他們帶回去複習。 事實上,這些免費的課程資料不僅可由網路上取得, 還可以把它們做成DVD光碟, 所以任何人只要有DVD撥放器就可以擁有一位好老師。 若這能推動到人事制度上, 我們將可以做得更好。
Now there's a book actually, about KIPP -- the place that this is going on -- that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote -- called, "Work Hard, Be Nice." And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
現在KIPP的故事被寫成一本書, 在這些故事發生的地方, Jay Matthews這名記者寫了:努力學習,對人友善。 我覺得這樣的觀點非常棒。 它讓人了解優秀老師是怎麼做的, 我將會送給在座一人一本。 (鼓掌)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill -- it's interesting -- the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.
今天,我們投資相當多的資金在教育上面, 而我也真的認為教育是非常重要的, 而且必須正確地執行,這樣我們的國家未來才有希望與保障。 很有趣的是,現在有許多振興方案, 由資料系統中我們可以看到眾議院都有這筆錢的預算, 但是到了參議院的手中就被移走了, 因為有些人怕這會威脅到他們。
But I -- I'm optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There's a lot more problems like that -- AIDS, pneumonia -- I can just see you're getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn't naturally make it happen. Governments don't naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn't naturally put its resources into these things.
但是我還是很樂觀, 我認為人們已經開始體認到教育的重要性了, 只要方法正確,這將影響數百萬人的生活方式。 時間只允許我討論這兩個問題, 但是還有更多類似的問題, 愛滋病(AIDS)、肺炎(pneumonia),我看到有些人已經開始興奮起來了, 當我提到這些特殊的名稱時。 要處理這些問題需牽扯到非常廣的技術層面。 但今天的系統還無法順利地替我們解決這些問題。 政府通常一開始也沒有用正確的方法來解決這些問題, 私人單位也沒有主動將資源投入解決這些問題。
So it's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved -- and you're helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there's some great things that will come out of it.
所以就需要像諸位一樣聰明的人 來研究這些事情,並且吸引更多的人來加入, 大家同心協力找出解決問題的方法。 我相信透過這樣的努力,將來一定會有偉大的回報!
Thank you. (Applause)
謝謝大家。 (鼓掌)