73. The Democratization of Education---Commencement Address by Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll at Oxford University

73. 教育的民主化——哥倫比亞女歌手夏奇拉在牛津大學的演講

I have a fantasy about this future that I want to share with you today.

我有一個對未來的幻想，在此我想和在座的各位一起分享。

Let me put it this way, if civilization were a car, we would have been cruising at 20 miles per hour for millions of years only to hit light speed in the last hundred.

讓我這么說吧，如果把文明比作一輛汽車，那么數百萬年以來我們一直在以每小時20英里的速度平穩行駛，但在最近的一百年里，它卻飛馳如光遠。

So I wonder what made us accelerate so quickly recently and how can we continue this pace? There is only one explanation to me, and that's the democratization of education.

所以，我在想：是什么讓我們的文明在最近這些年迅猛發展，我們又該如何保持這個速度呢？于我而言，答案只有一個，那就是教育的民主化。

I strongly believe that the best is yet to come, with universal access to education to feed our collective intelligence, with our commitment to meet and organize in places like this, with students like you-we could be so close to create a network of intellects, an enormous think tank devoted to sharing the best ideas and inspiring each other to keep learning, keep informing and keep advancing our world, and finding solutions to our common issues. Wouldn't that be great?

我深信最好的日子還沒有到來。通過普及教育來豐富我們集體的知識寶庫，通過我們的努力把大家召集到類似今天這種地方，通過像你們這樣的學生建立起一個人才網絡、一個巨大的思想寶庫，然后通過這個知識網絡和思想庫來分享最好的思想，激勵彼此不斷學習，不斷增長知識，以及讓我們的世界不斷發展前進，并為我們共同關心的問題找到解決方法。這該有多么美好??！

We have evolved so far in history, with so many technological advances in just the past century, so, how will we evolve in the next ten years, or twenty years, or fifty years-now that we know that the world has shrunk and has become just one big neighborhood.

在人類歷史的長河中，我們繁衍生息。在過去一個世紀中我們取得了許多科技進步，那么在未來的十年、二十年、或五十年中我們又將如何發展呢?我們知道現在世界已經變小了，演化成了一個大社區。

You are the architects of change. So tell me, how many things that seem inconceivable today will be obvious tomorrow? How long will man live? How will society be structured? Will we still be organized in couples, in communities with very nice governance? Sadly, at the current pace of change, we won't have universal access to education in a hundred years, let alone five. That is unacceptable.

你們是這些變化的設計師。那么請告訴我，有多少在今天看來不可思議的事情會在明天成為現實？人類將會活多久?社會將會如何構架？我們還會實行夫妻制嗎？我們還會在管理有序的社區生活嗎？悲哀的是，按照目前發展的速度，我們再用100年也無法普及教育，更別說五年了。這個事實讓人難以接受。

Especially, when the world has the resources to feed itself several times over, then, why are children starving? Latin America, alone has 3 times the necessary abundance to feed its entire population.

尤其是，當這個世界有成倍的資源用來養活自己的時候，為什么還有孩子在挨餓？例如，拉丁美洲，它擁有能夠供給其三倍人口的充裕食物。

These children can't wait; they can't wait a hundred more years.

這些孩子不能再等了，他們不能再等一百年了。

They need us to cure a child with Leukemia or AIDS with a simple pill or with a breakthrough vaccine. We need to live in a world in which together we can find a solution to global warming so we don't have to worry every time a single storm begins to form on the horizon. We need to find new ways to distribute food so no child goes to bed hungry.

他們需要我們用一粒簡單的藥片或一種突破性的疫苗來治好孩子的白血病或艾滋病。我們需要生活在這樣一個世界里，我們可以共同尋找全凍變暖的解決方案，這樣我們就不用擔心隨時可能有風暴發生。我們需要找到新的方法來分配食物，讓孩子們不會餓著肚子睡覺。

And I know that education is our ticket.
 

而教育，我知道，就是我們的方法。

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