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  3. Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are a

Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are a

游客2025-04-02  23
问题     Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, not scholars. Even our schools are where we send our children to
get a practical education—not to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Symptoms of pervasive anti-intellectualism in our schools aren’t difficult to find.
    "Schools have always been in a society where practical is more important than intellectual," says education writer Diane Ravitch. "Schools could be a counterbalance." Ravitch’s latest book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, traces the roots of anti-intellectualism in our schools, concluding they are anything but a counterbalance to the American distaste for intellectual pursuits.
    But they could and should be. Encouraging kids to reject the life of the mind leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and control. Without the ability to think critically, to defend their ideas and understand the ideas of others, they cannot fully participate in our democracy; "Continuing along this path," says writer Earl Shorris. "We will become a second-rate country. We will have a less civil society."
    "Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege," writes historian and professor Richard Hofstadter in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, a Pulitzer-Prize winning book on the roots of anti-intellectualism in U.S. politics, religion, and education. From the beginning of our history, says Hofstadter, our democratic and populist urges have driven us to reject anything that smells of elitism. Practicality, common sense, and native intelligence have been considered more noble qualities than anything you could learn from a book.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalist philosophers thought schooling and rigorous book learning put unnatural restraints on children: "We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for 10 or 15 years and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing." Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn exemplified American anti-intellectualism. Its hero avoids being civilized—going to school and learning to read—so he can preserve his innate goodness.
    Intellect, according to Hofstadter, is different from native intelligence, a quality we reluctantly admire. Intellect is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of the mind. Intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, and adjust, while intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, and imagines.
    School remains a place where intellect is mistrusted. Hofstadter says our country’s educational system is in the grips of people who "joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise". [br] Emerson, according to the text, is probably ______.
选项 A、a pioneer of education reform
B、an opponent of intellectualism
C、a scholar in favor of intellect
D、an advocate of regular schooling
答案 B
解析 本题可参照文章的第5段。从中可知，爱默生和其他先验论哲学家认为，学校教育和严谨的书本知识学习不正常地限制了孩子——我们被禁闭在中小学和大学的背诵室里10～15年，最后带着满腹经纶出来，却不懂任何东西；马克·吐温的《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》一书再现了美国人的反才智主义现象：书中的主人公逃避接受教育，所以他能够保持他天生的美德。据此可知，爱默生可能是反才智主义的。B项与文章的意思相符，因此B项为正确答案。
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