书中的万千世界Worlds of Words

Nothing embodies education more than books: reservoirs of knowledge, the exchange of ideas, the potential to learn what others have mastered.

没有什么比书籍更能承载教育:书是知识的宝库，人们可以通过阅读来交流思想，掌握他人已经掌握的知识。

Books take time, they take deliberate efforts. They require revision and review. They carve out spaces of sustained thought that invite us to engage more rigorously with ideas.

写书需要投入大量的时间和心力，需要反复修订。书籍创造出一个系统的思维空间，让我们更深入地与书中的想法互动。

Books also create time. From a life-long physics teacher, this might seem like a strange observation. In my classroom, time is an uninterrupted continuity, the per-second-squared of gravity. But time in the physical universe shows us only one dimension of a much more expansive reality.

书籍还能创造时间。我做了几十年物理教师了，从物理的角度来看，这一观点或许有些奇怪。在物理教室里，时间是一种不会被打断的连续，就如重力有恒定的单位值。但是，物理世界里的时间只是一个更加丰富的现实世界的一个维度而已。

We can take these worlds with us, tucked under our arms or stashed away in our bags. We can visit them on the subway, or in bed just before we fall asleep. We can share them with friends, and discuss our different responses to those shared texts.

我们可以把书中的世界带在身边，夹在腋下，或者塞到包里。我们可以在地铁上或者睡觉前躺在床上时去拜访这些世界。我们可以与朋友分享，讨论我们对同样文本的不同反应。

Books hold onto language, too, and give that language to us as a means of conversation. Now as an international school principal, I always encourage students to read novels. Seeing words in context, understanding how they’re used—this is infinitely better training than endless memorization of vocabulary.

书籍也都有自己的语言，并用这种语言与我们对话。作为一所国际学校的校长，我一直鼓励同学们读小说。在上下文中认识单词，理解他们的用法——这比没完没了地背单词要好得多。

I doubt any student has ever imagined their future in flashcards, or been inspired to greatness by memorizing the difference between adjectives and adverbs. While important knowledge, I’m sure they will gain such understanding with far greater depth and potential if they do so exploring the streets of London as imagined by Charles Dickens, or amidst the uncanny romances of Haruki Murakami’s imagination.

我不认为会有学生在背单词卡时想象过自己的未来，或者在记忆形容词和副词的区别中获得灵感而变得伟大。虽然这是重要的知识，但我相信，如果他们在书中去探索查尔斯·狄更斯(Charles Dickens)描绘出的伦敦街道，或者村上春树(Haruki Murakami)创作多神秘浪漫，他们会对这些语言知识有更深、更有启发性的理解和掌握。

All of these lofty goals begin with simple words on paper. The interaction of mind and text, of hand and page, lead to so much more.

所有这些崇高的目标都是从写在纸上的简单文字开始。我们的思维与文字的互动、手与书页的互动，可以给我们带来想象不到的世界。