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  3. Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, not schola

Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, not schola

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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 US 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."
The views of Ravitch and Emerson on schooling are______.
选项 A、identical
B、similar
C、complementary
D、opposite
答案D
解析 观点态度题。根据题干中的Ravitch和Emerson将本题出处定位于文章第二段和第五段。第二段中提到拉维奇的观点：学校始终处于重实用性而轻知识的社会中。学校本可以是一种平衡因素，但美国的学校绝对没有抵消美国人对追求知识的厌恶。可见拉维奇支持学校追求知识。第五段第一句提到爱默生和其他先验论者认为学校教育和严格的书本学习限制了孩子们的天性，他说：“我们在中小学和大学的教室里一关就是十年或十五年，最后出来满肚子墨水，却一无所知。”可见爱默生反对学校追求知识。因此拉维奇和爱默生的观点是相反的，答案为[D]项。
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