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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.
Emerson, according to the text, is probably______.
选项 A、a pioneer of education reform
B、an opponent of intellectualism
C、a scholar in favor of intellect
D、an advocate of regular schooling
答案B
解析 本题是细节题，难度不大。第五段第一句指出爱默生认为书本会压抑孩子们的天性，说明他是反对理智主义的，B项是近义改写，是答案。文章没有提到爱默生和学校教育改革的问题，A项是无中生有，不是解。C项与文意相反，也不是解。文章探讨的是思考教育和实用性教育，没有论及正常和不正常的学校教育，D项属于文中未提及，因而也不是解。
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