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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.
We can learn from the text that Americans have a history of______.
选项 A、undervaluing intellect
B、favoring intellectualism
C、supporting school reform
D、suppressing native intelligence
答案A
解析 本题是推断题，有较大难度。文章第四段最后一句“Practicality，common sense．and native intelligence have been considered more noble qualities than anything you could learn from a book”里，“have been considered”是现在宪成时态，表明美国从过去到现在一直是这样，“anything you could learn from a book”指的就是intellect，综合这两处，可以断定美国历史上就一直不重视思考能力．A项是近义改写，因而是解。B项与文意正相反，因此不是解。第二段提到Diane Ravitch的书，Left Back：A Century of Failed School Reforms，这个题目就说明美国历史上并没有支持学校教育改革，C项与文意相反，不是解。第四段最后一句谈到美国人认为天分比思考更重要，说明天分并没有受到压抑，D项与文意不符，也不是解。
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