Word: postman
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This optimistic but continually critical approach, writes Neil Postman, is exactly what American schools need. His latest book, The End of Education, is packed with similarly unconventional ideas which he hopes can reinvigorate our floundering educational system. Textbooks should be abolished, he says because they knowledge as finals and fixed. Teachers should be forced for semester to teach their worst subject--thus learning empathy for students who may be neither motivated nor talented...
These are daring suggestions but Postman the credentials to back them up. Though currently chair of the Department of Culture and Communication at NYC he's taught in elementary and secondary schools. And the twenty books he's written include studies of both children and education. "The end of education" turns out to be a rather ominous pun: Postman believes that unless the educational system can decide on an "end," it will...
...film's title: They Won't Forget. And they didn't. The "sweater girl" simmered through three decades of movies, mostly for MGM, which was the ideal studio for her high-wattage glamour. Aglow in white shorts, white top, white turban and acres of bare flesh for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), she bedazzled John Garfield into murder; in Johnny Eager (1942), she helped Robert Taylor live up to his character's name. Her turn in 1957's Peyton Place won her an Oscar nomination. She followed it with a role in the real-life melodrama that erupted when...
...STRUCTURE PROBLEM: At least there are some models of the cosmos-unpopular though they may be-that accommodate Freedman's age estimates. The same cannot be said for Lauer and Postman's detection of large-scale motions across the universe. Most scientists are betting that their observation is just plain wrong, but they haven't yet been able to pinpoint why. And both Lauer and Postman admit that the effect may wash out as they collect more data from deeper in space...
...both ideas are almost impossible to reconcile with any known model of the universe. Admits Postman: "If I'd been at the receiving end of this news, I'd be skeptical too. But the modus operandi of an observer is to report what Nature is telling us." And that's true whether or not the news conforms to the conventional wisdom...