Word: mainstream
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Scarcely a decade ago, such a welter of tongues would have been unspeakable in an American public school. For more than a century, the great melting-pot theory decreed that foreign-speaking children be taught solely in English to speed their assimilation into the mainstream. The children of 50 million immigrants were forced to master English that way. Some 22 states even outlawed teaching in foreign languages...
...with Spanish-surnamed children segregated in separate classes long after they can handle lessons conducted in English. "We fully recognize the benefits of cultural pluralism," says James Ward of the American Federation of Teachers. "But we must be sure that the central effort is to bring students into the mainstream of American life." Some foreign-born parents share his concern. Manuel Llera, principal of a junior high school in California's Sweetwater Union school district, near the Mexican border, has been forced by parental pressure to remove some Chicano children from the bilingual program. Parents, he says, "are afraid that...
Perhaps as it rejoins the respectable mainstream of Protestantism, success will spoil Evangelicalism. University of Chicago Theologian Martin Marty is put off by the self-indulgent Good Life of the reborn. "You may have to give up some drinking if you are born again, but you will eat well to make up for it. American businessmen are offered justification for their successful lives. Even religious TV comes over like a nightclub, with women in long dresses with decollete...
...question, which may determine whether or not the new Evangelicals eventually change the balance of power in U.S. Protestantism, is what they will do collectively with this passionate sense of God's presence in everyday life. Mainstream Protestantism, though dutifully devoted to social reform, often seems drained of vitality. For years it undervalued a notable Evangelical asset, the kind of religious zeal that causes embarrassment but might work miracles. One critic of the Evangelicals. Activist Preacher William Sloane Coffin Jr., of New York City's Riverside Church, ruefully tells the story of the Evangelical who said. "You could ice skate...
...Many mainstream Christians?particularly those most critical of the values of commercial American society and suspicious about serving God and Mammon together?are troubled by the way in which celebrated Evangelicals blend show biz and salvation. They deplore the star system they tend to foster and the amounts of cash required to maintain what has been referred to as the "country-and-westernization of religion...