AS THE summer holidays approached, the Greenwich Free School (GFS) recently celebrated the end of its first year with a trip to the seaside at Broadstairs. Everyone enjoyed it: London is blistering and GFS, which was launched under a scheme to liberate schools from local-authority control, has only a small patch of grass outside its huddle of temporary classrooms. But for a dozen of its 11-year-old pupils the trip was especially wonderful, because they had not seen the sea before.
前不久，暑假快要到了，格林威治免费学校去布罗德斯泰斯海边旅行，为自己的周年庆生。大家都很享受这次旅行：伦敦酷热难耐，为摆脱地方当局控制而新建的格林威治免费学校，仅在其拥挤的临时校舍外有一小片草地。对于该校
12
位
11
岁的学生来说，这次旅行却特别精彩，因为他们此前还没见过大海。
The school is in a tough quarter. In the grounds of a derelict nurses’ dormitory—which will be converted into classrooms over the holidays—it is close to the Shooter’s Hill housing estate, one of London’s grimmest. The name is an old one, perhaps referring to the17th-century highway men who once haunted the area; but some residents have kept it topical. A vast acreage of mean streets and tower blocks, the estate is crime-ridden. Over a third of GFS’s 100 pupils receive free school meals because their parents are poor. Many came from such “chaotic backgrounds”, in the careful phrase of Lee Faith, the 35-year-old headmaster, that they barely knew how to eat, talk or otherwise behave in public.
学校正值艰难之时。这里本是一座废弃的护士宿舍——假期将改为教室——紧靠着舒特斯希尔居民区，这是伦敦最冷清的居民区之一，名字是原先的老名字，可能取自
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世纪一度在此出没的一个公路劫匪，现在却成了一些居民热议的话题。一条条简陋街巷分隔着一大片的塔楼，这里一直犯罪猖獗。因家庭贫困，这所学校的
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名学生中接受学校的免费餐的超过了三分之一。
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岁的校长李•费因斯有一句很谨慎的话，说很多学生具有这样的“混乱背景”，他们几乎不知道在公共场合如何吃饭、谈话或其他礼仪。
Bagehot will have to take his word for that: there was no evidence of it during his recent visit to the school. Between classes, the kids scuffled quietly into line, wearing grey trousers,skirts and blazers stamped with the school crest—a silver compass to denote the nearby Greenwich observatory. The uniform is compulsory, as is the orderliness,and rule-breaking is not tolerated. The pupils carry green cardboard detention cards, on which they accrue points for even small misdemeanours. If they accrue too many, they face a ten-minute detention after lunch. If they accrue a lot, they are hauled in on a Saturday morning for extra tuition.
白芝浩最近访问学校时也没找到什么证据，于是也只得相信他说的话。课间，孩子们疾速地默默站成一排。他们着灰色的裤子、裙子和运动夹克，衣服上面印着学校的徽标——一个银色罗盘，这是附近格林威治天文台的标志。校服按规定是必须穿的，破坏纪律是不可容忍的。学生都有绿色纸板做成的拘留卡，就连小错误都在上面有记录。如果积分太多，午餐后可能要被关十分钟的禁闭。如果分数很多，某个星期六的早晨他可能被关起来以充抵额外的学费。
Remarkably, given that the school gave a place to every pupil who wanted one, including some pretty troubled children, this has only happened twice. No pupil has been expelled and, even with the riot of adolescence approaching, Mr Faith does not expect any to be. Mostpupils see the sense of the discipline. It distinguishes them from the wastrels outside their gates and means they don’t lose valuable learning time.
由于学校接收的是每一个想要上学的孩子，当然也有爱惹麻烦的孩子，上面说的情况只发生过两次，这一点尤其引人注目。没有学生被开除，即便是那些进入青春期不安分的孩子，费因斯校长也不希望有谁被开除。大多数学生都很守纪律。这是他们与校外的混混们的区别，说明他们没有失去宝贵的学习时间。
And it is valuable. Bagehot watched a lesson on the end of slavery in America become a sophisticated discussion of historiography; a science lesson, on gravity and pressure, morphed into a design class—the children had to design a contraption to stop an egg breakingon impact with the floor. Every child was involved and cajoled, to form judgments and ask questions—even if these were sometimes, as on a noticeboard in the science classroom, rather lavatorial: “Why is bird poo white?” “Why doyou throw up sometimes?” GFS is too young to be inspected by the government watchdog, Of sted—so it arranged an extraordinary inspection. The inspector said he had seen more “awe and wonder” in two days at GFS than during two years ofinspecting schools. If only every local child could experience that. But GFS is now six times oversubscribed.
这是难能可贵的。白芝浩曾听过一堂课，这堂课是有关美州奴隶制度覆灭的，最后成了一场精致的历史学讨论，还有一堂关于重力和拉力的科学课，最后变成一堂设计课，孩子需要设计出一种装置，使鸡蛋掉到地板上不会摔烂。他们关注到每一个孩子，让这些孩子自己作出判断，自己提出问题——有时他们甚至像科学课教室的布告栏中写着的那样低俗“为什么鸟儿的便便多是白色？”“为什么有时候你会吐？”这所免费学校历史短，政府监管机构“英国教育标准局”还未对他们进行过检查——因此他们组织了一个临时性的检查。检查人员说，这两天的检查比过去两年的检查看到的“敬畏和奇迹”还要多。要是每个当地的孩子都能体验到这一点就好了，但其招生人数只占报名人数的
1/6
。
No wonder advisers to Michael Gove, the dynamic Conservative education secretary, rave about this school. His academies programme, which has given autonomy to over half of England’s 2,000 secondaryschools, is one of the government’s most touted reforms. And start-up free schools such as GFS are where the innovations it is designed to encourage are most evident.
这样看来，活跃的保守党教育大臣迈克尔•高夫的顾问们大谈特谈这所学校就不足为怪了。他的院校改革计划，也就是向
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所英格兰中学的大部分学校下放自主权，是本届政府改革的最大亮点，按照他们的设计，创办像
GFS
这样的学校就是这项改革最直捷的做法。
Assured, in effect, of all the freedoms of a private school save over admissions, GFS’s originators, a trio of concerned Londoners, selected Shooter’s Hill as an area of great need, then set about designing the perfect school. For this they visited schools in Sweden and America, where similar reforms are long-standing, and across Britain. They the nrewrote the national curriculum. A class on computer skills was dropped infavour of computer programming; citizenship was replaced by politics,philosophy and economics—a course associated with Oxford University, which is where many of GFS’s pupils say they intend to study. They also lengthened the school day by fully three hours. In their seven years at the school, Mr Faith estimates, his pupils will therefore have the equivalent of two extra years of teaching.
实际上，私立学校的自由不仅仅在于招生。格林威治免费学校创办人，是一个关心公共事务的伦敦三人组合，他们选择舒特斯希尔作为校址，然后着手设计一个完美学校。为此，他们考察瑞典和美国的学校，那里，类似的改革由来已久，他们也考察了整个英国。他们重写了课程标准。把电脑技术课改为电脑程序课，把公民课改为政治学、哲学和经济学，这门课与牛津大学有着一定的联系，许多同学说他们愿意学习这门课程。他们把学习时间整整延长了三个小时，按费因斯先生估计，七年的学校生活，学生们将另获相当于两年的学习时间。
When Mr Gove claims the principle behind his landmark reform is a good one, he must be applauded. When his opponents in the Labour Party—though they launched a precursor scheme—pour scorn on that, they must be derided. This reform is a brave, and quite possibly brilliant, effort to shape up one of Britain’s most important and too often feeble sectors. There is little doubt that GFS will remain an excellent school. Yet how scalable—for this is the big uncertainty over Mr Gove’s reform—is its success?
当高夫宣布，其里程碑式改革的原则是一个好原则时，他一定会赢得掌声。当工党的对手（尽管他们实施了一个先躯改革计划）对他进行冷嘲热讽时，也一定会受到指责。这项改革是一个大胆的改革，极有可能成为一个漂亮的改革，它在努力打造英国最重要也常常是最虚弱的部门。不用怀疑格林威治免费学校将依旧是一所优秀的学校。但这也是高夫改革极难把握之处，它到底能够取得多大的成功呢？
