Word: idealizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...indeed, approaching the ludicrous--that smile as we may at its follies, or denounce its barbarities, the truly monumental achievements of the Middle Ages have become too vast for us to cope with, or even understand; we are too small and too afraid." Let me offer this as an ideal opening sentence to any question even tangentially nuding on the Middle Ages. And now you see, having dazzled me, won by your personal, involved, independently minded assertion, your only job is to keep me awake. When I sleep I give...
...this sense, then, "[v]ulgar cultural nationalists...like Allan Bloom or Leonard Jeffrey...are whistling in the wind." Whether they falsely assert Anglo-American culture as universal (a la Bloom) or "lay claim to the ideal of 'blackness' as an ideology or a quasi religion, totalized and essentialized into a protofascist battering ram supervised by official thought police" (a la Jeffries), they fail to ready the young for the world they will face...
Oddly enough, at some points Gates offers his own "traditional" justification for all this--from the writings of Cardinal Newman to the "age-old ideal" of mathesis universalis to simple "common sense" (which is used by the right to defend the Anglo-American canon "common sense," for example, might say that Shakespeare is "better" than Zora Neale Hurston).But in this case, Gates says, "[c]ommon sense says that you don't bracket 90 percent of the world's cultural heritage if you really want to learn about the world." Good point...
Gates' answer would be something like: Only if they are very bad writers. His ideal for a canon formation committee would include "a diverse array of ideological, methodological, and theoretical perspectives." In this manner, he hopes to achieve a larger conversation among many voices about what we should teach...
...requirements begin to dictate different, and quickly contradictory, solutions. Very thick mirrors resist physical deformation extremely well, but because they retain so much heat, they tend to generate shimmering currents in the cold night air that play havoc with astronomers' observations. Very thin mirrors, on the other hand, have ideal thermal properties but a daunting physical handicap: as the telescope pans across the sky, a thin mirror will bend and wobble as if made of rubber...