Comparison of American and third world students' preferences for conventional and alternative development ideas

Abstract

The issue of development has been widely discussed during the last four decades on social science. For over four decades the subject has been debated and examined from different perspectives. Theoretical perspectives on development have changed in response to the changing historical reality of the development process and of relations between developing and developed countries (Lehmann, 1979; Ardent, Evans and Stephens, 1988). In the 1950s and 1960s, the decades hall-marked by an intense interest in development themes, the classical development model was popular in the world and most countries adopted this strategy to achieve their economic development. In the 1980s, skepticism towards development theories such as modernization and human capital theories produced other development positions, e.g., the dependency school, world system approach, Neo-Marxism and so on.