Word: americans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mills' estimation, no balance of terror is possible. He directs his plea not so much to the military or the politicans, but to the intellectuals. Mills thinks that the intellectuals, if they exert their capacities politically, can be more powerful than at anytime in world history. He implores American intellectuals to devise programs enabling us to compete in the industrialization of the underdeveloped countries of the World. Industrialization is the master theme of our time, but we have failed to export our capitalistic system to Africa and Asia. Moreover, he warns, "the continued attempt by the U.S.A. to defend...
...choice, only a handful of potent" colleges actually induce the student to try out new attitudes. The great majority of institutions simply stabilize and give meaning to the middle class truisms with which the student left high school. With a few exceptions, of which Harvard is apparently one, the American college seems to accelerate students' assimilation into the dominant marketplace culture, rather than channeling or redirecting their growth. Students take new ideas seriously only when their college sub-culture makes the old outlook inapproprate. This means that the whole college atmosphere must be distincly "un-American," either because the scholars...
...youngster who comes to college is an ill-informed, irresponsible, unambitious product of American adolescence. His vision of life rarely goes beyond beer, dates, and perhaps reading a good book. And on this ill-kempt bumpkin depends the future of America. Out of such material we will build IBM machines and a World Bank. Obviously the college must do heroic things...
...American university is, as David Riesman has noted, the last refuge of free enterprise. In the literal sense it is a marketplace, where knowledge takes the place of money as common currency and people meet to exchange their ways. Scholars, like businessmen, hoard up this currency and use it to advance their ambitions. It is perhaps significant that the university library resembles a bank not only in its muffled impersonality, but in its very monumental achitecture...
...this emphasis on individual work and achievement makes the scholar peculiarly fitted to act as social elevator boy in modern society. Parents who seeks paths by which their children can transcend the increasingly rigid stratification of American society have discovered that education is practically the only road to the top. Only in the schools can the youngster learn to prefer competition and success to complacency and group approval. And only by succeeding in school can he convince the marketplace that he has the talents it demands. Indeed, the symbolic degree has become so important that even those born...