Word: mille
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wood tied with string line the sidewalk. Chipped red bricks, tin washbasins and wooden buckets for carrying water are scattered over the hard-packed earth. A few bicycles, all carefully locked, lean against the facades of three-story buildings. Three chickens cluck quietly inside a slatted wooden cage. Children mill about, some of them skipping rope, while their parents do the weekend wash, drawing water from streetside cold-water spigots...
Those contradictions are embodied by the movie's two principal characters, Michael (Robert De Niro) and Nick (Christopher Walken), steel-mill workers from Clairton, Pa., who go off unquestioningly to fight for their country. In the film's first hour, set at home, Cimino presents his buddies sympathetically as average men with traditional values: their lives are defined by work, family, church and a love of sport. What happens subsequently to Michael and Nick in Viet Nam is a paradigm of what happened...
...what my grandmother used to call hassenpfeffer--a mess, tossed together from mangled remnants of carcasses hidden underneath a spicy sauce that would ideally completely obscure the bastard origins (or incipient rot) of the ingredients heaped on the platter. The feast, rather than the ordinary run of the mill pigout, required hundreds of these "made" dishes, for which most valued praise the cook could receive was if the satisfied diner could not tell what had gone into the original concoction. At a feast given by Henry VIII in 1519, 260 such delightful melanges were served...
Though Holt's message flies in the face of a century-old tradition, home schooling was much more common during earlier centuries; its notable graduates include the likes of Alexander the Great and John Stuart Mill. Says Holt: "What impedes learning today is teaching, too much of it. The teacher takes all the fuel that makes the learning engine run and turns the students into passive laboratory rats...
...course, few stay-at-homes can hope for the kind of instruction that John Stuart Mill got both from his father James, one of the most brilliant men of 19th century England, and from Jeremy Bentham; or that Alexander the Great got from a tutor named Aristotle. But even those who reject Holt's radical solution find it hard to disagree with his view that administrative gobbledygook too often comes between children and their desire to learn. "People have been transmitting knowledge and skills for centuries," notes Holt. "Not everyone does it equally well, but it is an accessible skill...