Word: tone
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hirsch establishes his dour tone early on by distinguishing between literacy (the ability to read one's own language) and cultural literacy (possession of specific information). Students may be able to read at a ninth-grade level, according to Hirsch, and still be ignorant of history and society. He quotes a Latin pupil astonished to find that she is learning a dead language. "What do they speak in Latin America?" she demands. A California journalist testifies, "I have not yet found one single student in Los Angeles, in either college or high school, who could tell me the years when...
Stripped of its apocalyptic tone, what this amounts to is an advocacy of teaching names, dates and places by rote and providing a context later. Hirsch acknowledges that the method has been derided since Dickens satirized Pedant Thomas Gradgrind ("Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!") in Hard Times. But, he counters, "it isn't facts that deaden the minds of young children, who are storing facts in their minds every day with astonishing voracity. It is incoherence -- our failure to ensure that a pattern of shared, vividly taught, and socially enabling knowledge will emerge from our instruction...
...recall of U.S. Ambassador William Eagleton after an attempt by Syrian-backed terrorists to blow up an El Al flight in Britain. Though U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon John Kelly says it is "premature to talk about rapprochement between the U.S. and Syria," Washington officials are encouraged by the tone that marked Walters' sessions with Assad...
...issue differences that emerged (primarily on trade and oil-import fees) were introduced almost apologetically with phrases like "with all due respect." Jesse Jackson and Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, the orators of the group, seemed to believe that flights of rhetoric would be unseemly at such a high-tone forum. Two of the technocratic moderates in the race, Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt and Tennessee Senator Albert Gore Jr., were largely content to enhance their images of quiet competence. That void left Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Illinois Senator Paul Simon and former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt in charge of providing charisma...
...This battle won't involve smoking guns or skeletons," says Nan Aron of Alliance for Justice, a public-interest law group. "It's going to come down to philosophy." A no-holds-barred tone was quickly set for the Senate debate in a scathing speech by Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim...