英語演講稿：The Great Society
and our society will never be great until our cities are great. today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders. new experiments are already going on. it will be the task of your generation to make the american city a place where future generations will come, not only to live, but to live the good life. and i understand that if i stayed here tonight i would see that michigan students are really doing their best to live the good life.
this is the place where the peace corps was started.
it is inspiring to see how all of you, while you are in this country, are trying so hard to live at the level of the people.
a second place where we begin to build the great society is in our countryside. we have always prided ourselves on being not only america the strong and america the free, m.jcsycorp.com but america the beautiful. today that beauty is in danger. the water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. green fields and dense forests are disappearing.
a few years ago we were greatly concerned about the "ugly american." today we must act to prevent an ugly america.
for once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. and once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.
a third place to build the great society is in the classrooms of america. there your children’s lives will be shaped. our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. we are still far from that goal. today, 8 million adult americans, more than the entire population of michigan, have not finished 5 years of school. nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. nearly 54 million -- more than one quarter of all america -- have not even finished high school.
each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. and if we cannot educate today’s youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary school enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? and high school enrollment will rise by 5 million. and college enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.
in many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. most of our qualified teachers are underpaid and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. so we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.
but more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. we must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. this means better training for our teachers. it means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. it means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.
these are three of the central issues of the great society. while our government has many programs directed at those issues, i do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems. but i do promise this: we are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for america.
i intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of white house conferences and meetings -- on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. and from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the great society.
the solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. they require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the national capital and the leaders of local communities.