【通过阅读学词汇--六级】

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作者：ahbing

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Unit one
Elementary Schools in early America

What accounts for the great outburst of major
inventions in early america -- breakthroughs such as the
telegraph,the steamboat and the weaving machine?
Among the many shaping factors, I would single
out the country's excellent elementary schools; a labor
force that welcomed the new technology; the practice
of giving premiums to inventors; and above all the
American genius for nonverbal, "spatial" thinking
about things technological.
Why mention the elementary schools? Because
thanks to these schools our early mechanics, especially
in the New England and Middle Atlantic states, were
generally literate and at home in arithmetic and in some
aspects of geometry and trigonometry.
Acute foreign observers related American
adaptiveness and inventiveness to this educational
advantage. As a member of a British commission
visiting here in 1853 reported,"With a mind prepared
by thorough school discipline, the American boy
develops rapidly into the skilled workman."
A further stimulus to invention came from the
"premium" system, which preceded our patent system
and for years ran parallel with it. This approach,
originated abroad, offered inventors medals, cash
prizes and other incentives.
In the United States, multitudes of premiums for
new devices were awarded at country fairs and at the
industrial fairs in major cities. Americans flocked to
these fairs to admire the new machines and thus to
renew their faith in the beneficence of technological
advance.
Given this optimistic approach to technological
innovation, the american worker took readily to that
special kind of nonverbal thinking required in
mechanical technology. As Eugene Ferguson has
pointed out, "A technologist thinks about objects that
cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal
descriptions; they are dealt with in his mind by a visual,
nonverbal process. The designer and the inventor are
able to assemble and manipulate in their minds devices
that as yet do not exist."
This nonverbal "spatial" thinking can be just as
creative as painting and writing. robert fulton once
wrote, "The mechanic should sit down among levers,
screws, wedges, wheels, etc. , like a poet among the
letters of the alphabet, considering them as an
exhibition of his thoughts, in which a new arrangement
transmits a new idea."
When all these shaping forces -- schools, open
attitudes, the premium system, a genius for spatial
thinking -- interacted with one another on the rich U.S.
mainland, they produced that american characteristic,
emulation. Today that word implies mere imitation. But
in earlier times it meant a friendly but competitive
striving for fame and excellence.