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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 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".
What does the author think of intellect?
选项 A、It is second to intelligence.
B、It evolves from common sense.
C、It is to be pursued.
D、It underlies power.
答案C
解析 本题可参照文章的第1段。从中可知，美国人现在不太重视才智了。在我们的学校，不难发现普遍的反才智主义的现象。从第3段的内容可知，学校能够也应该成为反才智主义的平衡力。由于缺乏严谨思考的能力，缺乏捍卫自己的思想、理解他人思想的能力，这些孩子不可能完全融入我们的民主生活。如果继续这样发展下去，我们的国家将会成为二流国家，我们的社会的文明程度也会降低。据此可知，作者认为，由于才智非常重要，我们应该追求才智。C项与作者的观点相符，因此C项为正确答案。
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