Word: boorstins
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More than a third of a century ago, before anyone had ever heard of videotapes or the World Wide Web or 24-hour TV news stations, Daniel Boorstin, in his uncannily prescient book The Image, described how, as we move deeper into what he called the Graphic Revolution, technology would threaten to diminish us. Ideas, even ideals, would be reduced to the level of images, he argued, and faith itself might be simplified into credulity. "Two centuries ago, when a great man appeared," the historian wrote, "people looked for God's purpose in him; today we look for his press...
Excessive emphasis on method in courses intended for non-specialists is also pedagogically unsound. It is true that substance and method are everywhere intertwined. But what attracts and holds a beginner's interest is substance, not method. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes in his introduction to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that it "was the first extensive work of English literature (and history) that I read and reread. It occupied much of my thought during my university years as an undergraduate." Einstein recalls how he fell in love with mathematics...
...about how they are made. Substance and method are both essential, and Core courses should not ignore method. But substance must come first. If a work of science, history, literature, or art doesn't capture and hold our interest or evoke a strong aesthetic response, as Gibbon did for Boorstin and Euclid for Einstein, why should we care how it was made...
...first such disgrace. Four years ago, the National Museum of American Art produced an exhibition on America's westward expansion that mined every artifact for evidence of white racism and rapacity. Former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin called the show "perverse, historically inaccurate, destructive." These exhibits are not accidents. They reflect the extent to which the forces of political correctness and historical revisionism, having captured the universities, have now moved out to dominate our museums and other institutions of national culture...
...Straight-Talk Directive. In June 1993, Bob Boorstin, the task-force spokesman, urged colleagues to use plain language when explaining the plan. "The public cares less about the mechanics of ((health-care reform)), and when you talk to them, they want to know in English what will happen to them. Talk to them less like Ira," Boorstin advised, "and more like Roseanne...