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  3. Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are a

Americans today don’t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are a

游客2025-04-07  3
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 Pulitzer-Prize winning book on the roots of anti-intellectualism in U.S. 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, 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". [br] 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 从文章第1段的内容可知，美国人现在不太重视才智了；从文章第4段的内容可知，“才智受到人们的憎恶，”历史学家Hofstadter教授指出；他说，自美国的历史开始之时，美国的民主和平民的愿望就促使我们抵制任何带有精英政治味道的东西；实用性、常识以及天赋被看成是比你能够从书本中学得的任何东西都崇高的本领。据此可知，美国人有不重视才智的历史。因此A项为正确答案。
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