Popular Culture

Joseph C. Smith The Day the Music Died (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1981, 12.95 cloth)

Five Thousand Years of Popular Culture: Popular Culture Before Printing (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1980, 9.95 pb)

Barnard Rudofsky Now I Lay Me Down to Eat: Notes and Footnotes on the Lost Art of Living (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1980, 19.95, cloth).

Seymour and Rhoda L. Fisher's Pretend the World is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians, Clowns, and Actors (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981, 19.95, cloth)

Jock Kinneir, in Words & Buildings: The Art and Practice of Architectural Graphics (New York: Watson-Guptill, - 1980, 32.50, cloth).     

Coping with Contraction: the management of teaching staff

Summary

So where are we? Primary teachers should be asked to do fewer things. If we as Curriculum Theorists keep piling on more things they will either, sensibly, ignore us or try to do them all-ineffectively.

Everyone who bothers to look at the evidence will see the vast majority of primary teachers are conscientious but we are just providing a ridiculous ‘list’ of things for them to feel guilty at not doing. Curriculum theory must guide priorities, help reduce lists and demands. It must help teachers do less more fully. This is what the Curriculum Matters series is so signally failing to do. Its orientation is deeply Secondary and specialist not Primary and generalist. More importantly the same fault makes it too much about bits of being educated rather than providing perspectives on the whole enterprise. Even the whole curriculum one² (THE CURRICULUM 5–16). Curriculum Matters Series No. 2 HMSO 1985) gives little guidance on simplifying.

I have suggested three key purposes that could guide this simplification without demeaning the importance of quality and development in learning. Whilst I have called them Surviving, Cooperating and Celebrating I am somewhat encouraged by some similarities to the old trinity of Truth, technology ‘tests’ truth by seeing if it works), Goodness, (co-operating skills are essentially about working together, treating others as you would be treated yourself) and Beauty, (what better test of beauty can there be than the awe it inspires?).

If these were the basics we could even ‘go back to the basics’ and progress.     

Chrysophiles versus chrysophobes: the white asbestos controversy, 1950s-2004

In the first half of the twentieth century, asbestos was a controversial mineral because of its association with asbestosis and asbestos-related lung cancer. It has proved no less so since the 1960s, when another asbestos cancer, mesothelioma, was identified. Mesothelioma appeared to be more strongly linked with blue asbestos (crocidolite) than with the other asbestos varieties, brown (amosite) and white (chrysotile). This finding triggered a fierce debate between "chrysophiles" (those who declared chrysotile innocuous) and "chrysophobes" (those who believed it was a mortal hazard). This essay attempts the first history of the chrysotile controversy, which shows that a scientific consensus on the safety of white asbestos was very slow to emerge. This was only partly due to the complexities of scientific research. Political, economic, and social factors have militated against a speedy resolution of the debate, facilitating the continued production and use of asbestos in the developing world.