Word: tacitly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...have been an intermittent teacher all my life and when, as this year, I return to a university community. I find myself continually drawing comparisons, not comparisons between institutions but comparisons between something far more striking and instructive, comparisons between attitudes, tacit assumptions, the thought-world of students that I have known throughout the decades of my teachings: attitudes that we held in 1917, 1918, 1919 and 1930, attitudes that my students in the University of Chicago held in the '30s, and the attitudes which I see in the students around me this year. What a difference! What a difference...
...talking about tacit assumption, basic attitudes of so deep a level that they themselves are often not aware. But what they are aware of is that many of the concepts to which we older persons clung are to them irrelevant, irrelevant and irritating...
...very attentive to it. Now, freshmen and sophomores stop me on the street and visit me in my rooms to ask me about these very writers. And that shows us that these writers are fulfilling a profound need for those who live in stormy weather. And I find three tacit assumptions within their work that are reflected in the best young 20th century minds, assumptions that he could not have grasped...
First, the young person today in the light of science sees himself not as one of many hundred thousands, not as one of many millions, but as one of billions. Secondly, a whole new tacit assumption in relation to responsibility. And, thirdly, a realization that the things that separate men from one another are less important than the things that they have in common...
...second tacit assumption is this matter of responsibility. The young of today are not haunted by the notion of a Golden Age. We who were born about 1900 remember that span of security. We who lived through the late '20s and early '30s, the liberal movements, were filled with a notion that if we strained and strained and strained we would pretty soon usher in a Utopia. These young have not that impatience. They have not that regret. It is not a matter of disillusion nor does it mean that they are indifferent to social betterment...