中国文化英语概论 第8课test A.doc

 Text A Intellectual Freedom and Chinese Education By John Bryan Starr In American culture, the term intellectual carries several connotations1 along with its standard meaning of someone who devotes himself to the life of the mind, who thinks about thinking. The other connotations are frequently uncomplimentary2. Intellectuals are seen as iconoclasts3. They question orthodoxy4. They are assumed to be liberals—in the political sense, but more often in the sense of seeing both sides of an issue and being reluctant to come down firmly on5 one side or the other, spending a lot of time saying on the one hand . . . on the other hand. . . . Finally, intellectual may often be a term of disapproval. Americans have a long tradition of anti-intellectualism, intellectual historians point out. Pointy-headed6 intellectuals are absentminded and hopelessly impractical, isolating themselves in ivory towers rather than offering practical solutions to real-world problems. Yet American culture takes intellectual freedom very seriously indeed, the freedom that individuals—not just intellectuals—have to think, say, write, publish, and teach whatever they choose. American law offers safeguards for intellectual freedom as well as for what is called intellectual property. Moreover, American schools and universities with their tenure7 systems protect teachers and professors from political reprisals8 against what they publish or what they teach in the classroom. Chinese intellectuals are aware of this Western—indeed peculiarly9 American—concept of the intellectual but know it to be very different from the concept of the intellectual in the Chinese tradition: an individual who had mastered a particular canon10. Mastery was confirmed by passing an examination set by the imperial government, and, once credentialed11, the intellectual might contribute to the canon by modifying it incrementally12