早晨读闲书，看了一篇 Wendell Phillips 在1881年的演讲词，The Scholar in a Republic.
是在哈佛大学校友联谊会成立100周年庆典上的讲话。

"We all agree in the duty of scholars to help those less favored in
life, and that this duty of scholars to educate the mass is still more
imperative in a republic, since a republic trusts the state wholly to
the intelligence and moral sense of the people."
“... law has no atom of strengh, either in Boston or New Orleans, unless, and only so far as, public opinion indorses it, and that your life, goods, and good name rest on the moral sense, self-respect, and low-abiding mood of the men that walk the steets, and hardly a whit on the provisions of the statute book.”

"It would be no exaggeration to say that government itself began in
usurpation, in the feudalism of the soldier and the gigotry of the
priest; that liberty and civilization are only fragments of rights
wrung from strong hands of wealth and book learning (富有者和读书人）. Almost
all the great truths relating to society were not the result of
scholarly meditation, "having up wisdom with each curious year," but
have been first heard in the solemn protests of martyred patriotism
and the loud cries of crushed and starving labor. When common sense
and the common people have stereotyped a principle into a statute,
then bookmen come to explain how it was discovered and on what ground
it rests. The world makes history, and scholars write it, --one half
truly and the other half as their prejudices blur and distort... " (我觉得他这一段特有革命精神，人民才是创造历史的动力嘛！）

那么，这么多学校还有我等在其中混饭吃的老师们，是干啥的呢？

"Hence, I do not think the greatest things have been done for the world by its bookmen. Education is not the chips of arithmetic and grammar, --nouns, verbs, and the multiplication table; neither is it that last year's almannac of dates, or series of lies agreed upon, which we so often mistake for history. Education is not Greek and Latin and the air pump. Still, I rate at its full value the training we get in these walls. Though what we actually carry away is little enough, we do get some training of our powers, as the gymnast or the fencer does of his muscles; we go hence also with such general knowledge of what mankind has agreed to consider porved and settled, that we know where to reach for the weapon when we need it.  "