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1、第 1 页 英语演讲稿：The Great Society1 特征码 MnugJEbQxVLlylgAkrzJ president hatcher, governor romney, senators mcnamara and hart, congressmen meader and staebler, and other members of the fine michigan delegation, members of the graduating class, my fellow americans: it is a great pleasure to be here today. t
2、his university has been coeducational since 1870, but i do not believe it was on the basis of your acplishments that a detroit high school girl said (and i quote), “in choosing a college, you first have to decide whether you want a coeducational school or an educational school.“ well, we can find bo
3、th here at michigan, although perhaps at different hours. i came out here today very anxious to meet the michigan student whose father told a friend of mine that his sons education had been a real value. it stopped his mother from bragging about him. i have e today from the turmoil of your capital t
4、o the tranquility of your campus to speak about the 第 2 页 future of your country. the purpose of protecting the life of our nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a nation. for a century we
5、 labored to settle and to subdue a continent. for half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. the challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national lif
6、e, and to advance the quality of our american civilization. your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. for in your tim
7、e we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the great society. the great society rests on abundance and liberty for all. it demands an end to poverty and racial i 第 3 页 injustice, to which we are totally mitted in our time. but that is j
8、ust the beginning. the great society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. it is a place where leisure is a wele chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. it is a place where the city of man serves not only t
9、he needs of the body and the demands of merce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for munity. it is a place where man can renew contact with nature. it is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. it is a place where men are more conce
10、rned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods. but most of all, the great society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. it is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning 第 4 页 us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the ma
11、rvelous products of our labor. so i want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the great society - in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms. many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million americans - four-fift
12、hs of them in urban areas. in the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes and highways and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. so in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban united
13、 states. aristotle said: “men e together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life.“ it is harder and harder to live the good life in american cities today. the catalog of ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. the
14、re is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. open land is van 第 5 页 ishing and old landmarks are violated. worst of all expansion is eroding these precious and time honored values of munity with neighbors and munion with nature. the loss of these values breeds lonelines
15、s and boredom and indifference. 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
16、 a place where future generations will e, 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
17、all of you, while you are in this country, are trying so hard to live at the level of the people. 第 6 页 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, but america the beautiful
18、. 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 americ
19、an.“ 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 so
20、ciety is in the classrooms of america. there your childrens 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 第 7 页 from that goal. today, 8 million adult americans, more than the entire po
21、pulation 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 colleg
22、e because they cannot afford it. and if we cannot educate todays 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, class
23、rooms 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 第 8 页 to learning, and learning must offer an escape from po
24、verty. 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
25、 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
26、 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 e
27、ducation, and on other emerging challenges. and from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these 第 9 页 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
28、 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 munities. woodrow wilson once wrote: “every man sent out from his university should be a man of his nation as well as a man of his time.“
29、 within your lifetime powerful forces, already loosed, will take us toward a way of life beyond the realm of our experience, almost beyond the bounds of our imagination. for better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead america toward a ne
30、w age. you have the chance 第 10 页 never before afforded to any people in any age. you can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation. so, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which god enjo
31、ins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin? will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty? will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace - as neighbors and not as morta
32、l enemies? will you join in the battle to build the great society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit? there are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. i do not a
33、gree. we have the power to shape the civilization that we want. but we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of 第 11 页 society. those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. they sought a new world. so i have e here today to yo ur campus to say that you can make their vision our reality. so let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: it was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life. thank you. good-bye