Word: neither
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lack of a high school diploma can be a crippling disadvantage. To deny graduation to so great a segment of the population at such an early stage in the history of this test, when its content and grading mechanism are still unclear, would be a grave mistake, helping neither the students nor the educational system...
Fundamentally, the argument comes down to the idea that a student's entire high school career should not depend on one fickle test, for no test provides a perfect measurement of achievement. A high school diploma should not be a giveaway, but neither should it depend upon what appear to be unrealistically high expectations of performance. Students should receive some sort of a diploma if they pass the required high school courses...
...creatively pierced, multiply tattooed teenagers who hang out at every mall in America probably don't realize it--and neither, undoubtedly, do their unsettled parents--but they belong to a tradition as old as recorded history--probably much older. Ever since our Neolithic ancestors invented art tens of thousands of years ago, humans have been painting, sculpting and otherwise decorating everything in sight. The human body is just the nearest and most intimate canvas. Says anthropologist Enid Schildkrout of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City: "There is no known culture in which people do not paint...
Society's horrified reaction has plenty of precedent as well. In Leviticus, God tells Moses: "Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you." And John Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis, Man Transformed or, the Artificial Changeling, Historically Presented, a Puritan diatribe published in 1653, railed against disfigurement of the body in pursuit of "ridiculous beauty," "filthy fineness" and "loathesome loveliness...
...somehow that doesn't matter. Neither does the fact that Levinson packs his movie with more melodrama--including Little Melvin's kidnapping of Ben and Sylvia from an early rock concert--than you would think it could hold. What's important is the casual, even digressive, movement of the piece. It plays like a memoir, not a conventional three-act movie. There's room here for Ben to shock his family by dressing as Hitler for Halloween, for a faux-naive stripper to electrify Nate's theater, for the strange power of a new-model Cadillac to cloud the mind...