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  3. Symptoms of Pervasive Anti - Intellectualism Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athl

Symptoms of Pervasive Anti - Intellectualism Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athl

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问题                Symptoms of Pervasive Anti - Intellectualism
    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 counter - balance. " 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," wrote by 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 (满腹) 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 do American parents expect their children to acquire in school? ______
选项 A、The habit of thinking independently.
B、Profound knowledge of the world.
C、Practical abilities for future career.
D、The confidence in intellectual pursuits.
答案C
解析 本题是细节题，难度不大。文章第一段第三句“Even our schools are where we send our children to get a practical education—not to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge．”谈到美国人将孩子送到学校的目的就是让孩子接受实用性教育，C项是近义改写，因而是解。第三段第三句“Without the ability to think critically,…”谈到了独立思考问题，而根据第一、二、三段的语篇结构，作者认为独立思考是思考能力的结果，而孩子学的不是思考能力，而是实用性教育，所以答案是C。
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