Meeting America's diversity challenge through community service and regional cooperation: The greater philadelphia high school partnership
✍ Scribed by Ted Hershberg; Carrie Kitchen
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Weight
- 437 KB
- Volume
- 86
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0027-9013
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Two demographic projections loom large over America's future. In the year 2020,45 percent of the nation's youth under eighteen years of age will be nonwhite. And in 2050, almost half the nation's population will be nonwhite.
America faces a fundamental choice in how it deals with this growing diversity. When ethnic, racial, and religious animosities are left unchecked, history records horrific acts of terror and carnage, as represented by the African slave trade, the Holocaust, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Either diversity will emerge as America's great strength or it will be our Achilles heel. Either we figure out how to make it work to our advantage as we did through much of our history, when millions of largely white immigrants from different cultures, religions, and national origins were successfully brought into America's mainstream, or it will undermine us as it has so many other nations.
America's growing racial, ethnic, and religious diversity-potentially "a great thing," President Clinton recently observed-could turn into a "powder keg of problems, heartbreak, division, and loss. . . . How we handle it . . . may be the biggest determinant of what we look like fifty years from now and what our position in the world is." Speaking to middle-schoolers, the president counseled: "Get to know people who are your age but who are different from you (people of a different racial or ethnic group, people of a different religion) Note: For more information regarding the Greater Philadelphia High School Partnership and other Center for Greater Philadelphia projects, access the center on the World Wide Web at http://www.libertynet.org;80/-cgphila