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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2025-04-06  32
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, reorder, and adjust, while intellect examines, thinks, 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] What does the author think of intellect?
选项 A、It evolves from common sense.
B、It is second to intelligence.
C、It is to be pursued.
D、It underlies power.
答案 C
解析 作者对理性才智有何看法?理性才智是应该追求的。作者在论述理性才智时开门见山地指出，美国人不重视理性才智，接着引用各家不同的看法，最后指出学校仍然是理性才智受到怀疑的地方。霍夫斯达特说，我们国家的教育制度掌握在这样一些人手中，他们高兴地、好斗地宣称他们对理性才智的敌视，宣称渴望认同理性才智前景最差的儿童。由此可见，作者对反主知主义持批评的态度。言下之意是：理性才智(intellect)是要培养的，是学校不可推卸的职责。
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