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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

admin2010-06-30  81
问题    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 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. 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 Pulizer 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 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, reorder, 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 does the author think of intellect?
选项 A、It is second to intelligence.
B、It evolves from common sense.
C、It is to be pursued.
D、It underlies power.
答案C
解析 本题为作者观点态度题。综观全文，尤其是第一段首句：今天的美国人不太重视学识……；以及第三段首句，但学校是能够并应该做到这一点的。鼓励孩子放弃精神上的追求，会使他们容易被利用和控制。由此可以推断出，作者实际上是赞成对学识的追求和重视的。所以选项C为正确答案。
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