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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.
The views of Ravitch and Emerson on schooling are______.
选项 A、identical
B、similar
C、complementary
D、opposite
答案D
解析 本题是细节题，有较大难度，考点是对比处常考。文章第二段谈到Ravitch的观点是，学校根本没有抵制美国人厌恶思考活动的坏风气，这是学校教育一个世纪的失败，言外之意，他认为学校应改革，应鼓励学生追求思考，第五段第一句指出爱默生认为书本会压抑制孩子们的天性，可以断定二人的观点正好相反，既不等同，也不类似，也不互补，所以只有D项是答案，A、B、C三项都不是解。
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