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 Twains 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 countrys 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.
【推荐值得背诵的考研阅读真题十九】相关文章:
★ 六级经典的阅读7
最新
2016-10-18
2016-10-11
2016-10-11
2016-10-08
2016-09-30
2016-09-30