Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
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我们的孩子：危机中的美国梦
DOI：
10.5860/choice.191635
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发表时间：
2015
影响因子：
5.2
通讯作者：
Robert D. Putnam
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Robert D. Putnam
这就是美国梦：接受良好的教育，努力工作，买房子，实现繁荣和成功。这就是我们所相信的美国——一个充满机遇的国家，只受能力和努力的限制。但在过去25年里，我们看到一个令人不安的“机会差距”出现了。美国人一直相信机会平等，所有的孩子，不管他们的家庭背景如何，都应该有一个体面的机会来改善他们的生活。现在，美国梦的核心原则似乎不再是真的，或者至少，比以前更不真实了。罗伯特·普特南——《经济学人》评价他说：“他的学识广博，智慧过人，语调谦逊，文笔朴实，常常风趣幽默”——对这场新的美国危机提供了一种个人而又权威的看法。帕特南从他在俄亥俄州克林顿港的1959届高中开始说起。总的来说，这些学生中的绝大多数——“我们的孩子”——比他们的父母过得更好。但他们的子女和孙辈的生活却越来越艰难，前景越来越渺茫。普特南通过来自全国各地城市和郊区的富人和穷人孩子的辛酸生活故事，讲述了机会减少的故事，并利用了专门为本书做的大量研究。《我们的孩子》是一个罕见的结合了个人证词和严格证据的案例。帕特南对美国梦提供了一个令人不安的描述，应该引发对我们国家未来的深刻审视。
It's the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in-a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a disturbing "opportunity gap" emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life. Now, this central tenet of the American dream seems no longer true or at the least, much less true than it was. Robert Putnam-about whom The Economist said, "his scholarship is wide-ranging, his intelligence luminous, his tone modest, his prose unpretentious and frequently funny"-offers a personal but also authoritative look at this new American crisis. Putnam begins with his high school class of 1959 in Port Clinton, Ohio. By and large the vast majority of those students-"our kids"-went on to lives better than those of their parents. But their children and grandchildren have had harder lives amid diminishing prospects. Putnam tells the tale of lessening opportunity through poignant life stories of rich and poor kids from cities and suburbs across the country, drawing on a formidable body of research done especially for this book. Our Kids is a rare combination of individual testimony and rigorous evidence. Putnam provides a disturbing account of the American dream that should initiate a deep examination of the future of our country.