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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

admin2019-07-08  57
问题 Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, not scholars.【F1】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.【F2】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 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.【F3】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, "【F4】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.【F5】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."
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答案即使学校也只是我们送孩子去接受实用教育的地方，而不是让他们为了知识而去追求知识的地方。
解析     本文主要使用了引证方法论述了美国学校轻视才智的倾向，并探讨了其危害性及根源。文章总体结构分为四个部分。第一段：指出不注重才智的现象在美国学校中普遍存在，而学校没有起到应有的抗衡反才智主义的作用，并剖析了学校轻视才智的危害。第二段：引用历史学家的观点指出了反才智主义的历史根源。第三段：比较了才智和先天智力的不同，并指出应受到赞赏的是才智而非先天智力。第四段：指出学校依然怀疑才智的现状，并引用霍夫斯塔特的话语，表达了作者对助长这种风气的学校管理者的讽刺。
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