【采訪內(nèi)容節(jié)選】
Melinda Gates: This is in Africa, our very first trip, the first time either of us had ever been to Africa, in the fall of 1993. We were already engaged to be married. We married a few months later, and this was the trip where we really went to see the animals and to see the savanna. It was incredible. Bill had never taken that much time off from work. But what really touched us, actually, were the people, and the extreme poverty. We started asking ourselves questions. Does it have to be like this?
梅琳達(dá)·蓋茨:這是我們第一次旅行,在非洲拍的。我們倆都是第一次去非洲,那是1993年的秋天,我們已經(jīng)訂婚。幾月后,我們結(jié)婚了,我們想通過這次旅行看看野生動(dòng)物和熱帶草原。真是太美了。比爾和我從來沒有放過這么長的假。但是真正讓我們深受觸動(dòng)的是那兒的人,那兒的貧窮。我們開始捫心自問,一切只能是這樣嗎?
Bill Gates: Well, we decided that we'd pick two causes, whatever the biggest inequity was globally, and there we looked at children dying, children not having enough nutrition to ever develop, and countries that were really stuck, because with that level of death, and parents would have so many kids that they'd get huge population growth, and that the kids were so sick that they really couldn't be educated and lift themselves up. So that was our global thing, and then in the U.S., both of us have had amazing educations, and we saw that as the way that the U.S. could live up to its promise of equal opportunity is by having a phenomenal education system, and the more we learned, the more we realized we're not really fulfilling that promise.
比爾·蓋茨:我們決定選擇兩個(gè)方面:任何世界上最不公平的事,這指的是垂死的兒童,營養(yǎng)跟不上的兒童,因?yàn)楦咚劳雎拾l(fā)展停滯不前的國家,國家人口劇長,孩子病得太重,他們沒法受教育養(yǎng)活自己。這是世界的情況,而在美國,我們夫妻倆都受過良好的教育,我們看到美國實(shí)現(xiàn)“機(jī)會(huì)平等”這一承諾的途徑就是其良好的教育體系。我們了解的越多,就越深刻地意識到我們并沒有完全兌現(xiàn)我們的承諾。
So this is a story largely of vaccines. Smallpox was killing a couple million kids a year. That was eradicated, so that got down to zero. Measles was killing a couple million a year. That's down to a few hundred thousand. Anyway, this is a chart where you want to get that number to continue, and it's going to be possible, using the science of new vaccines, getting the vaccines out to kids. We can actually accelerate the progress.
所以這個(gè)故事主要說的是疫苗。以前,每年有幾百萬的兒童死于天花?,F(xiàn)在我們擺脫它了,死亡數(shù)變成了零。每年有百萬人死于麻疹,現(xiàn)在這個(gè)數(shù)字是幾十萬。總之,在這張圖表中,如果你讓數(shù)字繼續(xù)下去,就有可能利用新疫苗技術(shù)為兒童提供疫苗。我們可以加快這個(gè)進(jìn)程。
Because we built this thing together from the beginning, it's this great partnership. I had that with Paul Allen in the early days of Microsoft. I had it with Steve Ballmer as Microsoft got bigger, and now Melinda, and in even stronger, equal ways, is the partner, so we talk a lot about which things should we give more to, which groups are working well? She's got a lot of insight. She'll sit down with the employees a lot. We'll take the different trips she described. So there's a lot of collaboration. I can't think of anything where one of us had a super strong opinion about one thing or another?
因?yàn)槲覀儚牧汩_始建立了它,這是一種絕妙的伙伴關(guān)系。微軟早期,我曾和保羅·艾倫有那種伙伴關(guān)系。微軟的成長期我有史蒂夫·巴摩,現(xiàn)在微軟更強(qiáng)了,梅琳達(dá)以一種更穩(wěn)固,更平等的方式成為了我的伙伴。我們談?wù)摿撕芏啵男┦虑楦鼞?yīng)該重視,哪一個(gè)團(tuán)隊(duì)運(yùn)作的很好?她有很多深刻見解。她能和員工打成一片。我們各自出行,就像她說的,我們也有很多合作。我想不出有哪件事一方的主張?zhí)貏e強(qiáng)烈。
Well, I would say a huge lesson for us out of the early work is we thought that these small schools were the answer, and small schools definitely help. They bring down the dropout rate. They have less violence and crime in those schools. But the thing that we learned from that work, and what turned out to be the fundamental key, is a great teacher in front of the classroom. If you don't have an effective teacher in the front of the classroom, I don't care how big or small the building is, you're not going to change the trajectory of whether that student will be ready for college.
我想說的是一個(gè)深刻的教訓(xùn),工作早期,我們以為小規(guī)模的學(xué)校就是解決辦法,當(dāng)然小規(guī)模學(xué)校有一定作用,可以減少輟學(xué)率。學(xué)校內(nèi)的暴力事件和犯罪比較低。但是我們從工作中學(xué)到的,也是最重要的一件事就是課堂上必須有個(gè)好老師。如果沒有有效率的老師,無論教室大或小,你都不可能改變學(xué)生是否已經(jīng)準(zhǔn)備好上大學(xué)的軌跡。