Word: successful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this dialogue." Kissinger, however, was not really telling the OPEC nations that they should drastically roll back the price of oil. Rather, his aim seemed to be to drive a wedge between the oil producers and the truly poor. If that was indeed the American strategy, it had little success: the oil-producing states dominated their poorer brethren in the conference's deliberations. Four commissions were set up to examine the world's economic problems-under broad headings of energy, development, raw materials and financial questions-with co-chairmen from both developed and less developed nations. OPEC members...
...quite competitive society. In the background lurks fear: Will my child lose, will he or she slip back, will the result be failure, real or imaginary? No admission to schools like A or B, no acceptance at colleges like X or Y and, long before that, a lack of success at the hurdles of tennis and baseball, camp activities or a first dance? For many children, the problem is not how to survive, as it was 200 years ago, or even how to enjoy an already comfortable life, but how to make sense of an avalanche of possessions, opportunities, possibilities...
...poverty or insecurity and up, up, up. It is quite another matter when a child is taught to behave in a certain way, to go to certain schools or camps and get along at them in a certain way, because that is what a healthy, welladjusted, "successful" child or youth manages to do. One mother, the wife of a well-to-do lawyer, has spoken to me repeatedly of her concern for her children. She knows they will probably find reasonably worthwhile jobs or professions when they are older. But she wants more from them-high competence, excellence, repeated demonstrations...
Many of our contemporary educational problems and controversies can be understood as part of a persisting American ideological commitment to success-to a firm belief in its possibility, to a desire for proof of its achievement, here and now. Even Cotton Mather, no pagan hedonist or crass materialist or psychologically "oriented" suburbanite, wanted his children to prosper-and saw in such a fate for them a realization of himself. Today many of us fight for our children as if it were heaven itself we have in mind as we roll up our sleeves or bare our teeth. If public schools...
...famine and violence (sometimes even cannibalism) were rampant in primitive societies; inequality of wealth and power was the rule rather than the exception. Almost all the underdeveloped nations were poor before industrialization began in the North, and they cannot blame their continued Impoverishment on the First World's success...