Text 4Jill Ker Conway ,president of Smith ,echoes the prevailing view of contemporary tech

Text 4

Jill Ker Conway ,president of Smith ,echoes the prevailing view of contemporary technology when she says that " anyone in today's world who doesn't understand data processing is not educated. " But she insists that the mcreasing emphasis on these matters leave certain gaps. Says she: "The very strongly utilitarian emphasis in education ,which is an effect of man-made satellites and the cold war, has really removed from this culture something that was very profound in its 18th and 19th century roots ,which was a sense that literacy and learning were ends in themselves for a demo- cratic republic. "

In contrast to Plato's claim for the social value of education,a quite different idea of intellectu-al purposes was advocated by the Renaissance humanists. Ovejoyed with their rediscovery of the classical leaming that was thought to have disappeared during the Dark Ages,they argued that the imparting of knowledge needs no justification-religious ,social ,economic ,or political. Its purpose,to the extent that it has one ,is to pass on from generation to generation the corpus of knowledge that constitutes civilization. "What could man acquire ,by virtuous striving ,that is more valuable than knowledge？" asked Erasmus ,perhaps the greatest scholar of the early 16th century. That idea has acquired a tradition of its own. "The educational process has no end beyond itself," said John Dewey. "It is its own end. "

But what exactly is the corpus of knowledge to be passed on？ In simpler times ,it was all included in the medieval universities' Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music ) and Trivium(grammar, thetoric ,logic). As recently as the last century ,when less than 5% of Americans went to college at all, students in New England establishments were compelled mainly to memorize and recite various Latin texts,and crusty professors angrily opposed the introduction of any new scientific discoveries or modern European languages. "They felt," said regretfully Charles Francis Adams, Jr. ,the Union Pacific Railroad president who devoted his later years to writing history ,"that a classical education was the important distinction between a man who had been to college and a man who had not been to college ,and that anything that diminished the importance of this distinction was essentially revolutionary and tended to anarchy. "

56. The first paragraph shows that Jill Ker Conway accepts utilitarian emphasis in education

[A] wholeheartedly.

[B] with reservation.

[C] against her own will.

[D] with contempt.