Our Times: Dress for Success in the 1980s
The debate was, "Could Superwoman manage it all?" She tried, but Math Anxiety plus the Salary Gap meant she lost sleep over her Bag Lady Syndrome – fear of ending up penniless. Photo courtesy of classicstock.com.
1980
Ted Turner starts Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-hour television channel devoted exclusively to news. By 2007, it reaches 1.5 billion viewers worldwide.
1981
In Adults as Learners, Patricia Cross presents an integrated theory of adult education that incorporates programs by museums, businesses, churches, and campuses.
Launch of Music Television (MTV), a cable station combining music videos, interviews, and concerts. The next year, USA Today, the first national daily general-interest newspaper, furthers the trend toward news in short nuggets.
1982
Jane Fonda's Workout video brings fitness lessons home.
1983
"A Nation at Risk," a report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, describes "a rising tide of mediocrity," due to declining literacy and achievement test scores among American students.
Frames of Mind, by Howard Gardner, challenges the notion of a single intelligence measured in terms of how high or low it is. His theory of multiple intelligences changes the way teachers and school districts approach learning.
1984
Jaron Lanier, 24, inventor of "virtual reality" (VR), founds VPL Research, a company to produce the software, headsets, gloves, and suits to allow "cybernauts" to interact with a 3-D simulated world.
1986
Wally "Famous" Amos, cookie entrepreneur, becomes the face of PBS's "adult literacy" programs, beginning with "GED on TV."
1987
In The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, Allan Bloom argues that contemporary American university had adopted wholesale relativism in place of age-old truths, thus shutting students off from the enlightenment that he believed came from Platonic ideals.
E. D. Hirsch Jr., in Cultural Literacy, posits that American children are not being taught the basic knowledge to function in contemporary society and offers 5,000 "essential facts" Americans need to have in common.
1988
Stand and Deliver, based on a true story, gives us Edward James Olmos as a technology specialist who quits a high-paying job to teach math in a tough high school in a Hispanic neighborhood. He proves his students can learn calculus well enough to pass a test for college credit.
The National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy collaborate on the $3 billion Human Genome Project. Its goal: to decode and map human DNA and discover the molecular basis of all diseases.
About the Authors
Mark Ciabattari is a novelist and cultural historian, and author of the forthcoming book Social History of the United States: The 1940s. Jane Ciabattari is a widely-published journalist and frequent contributor to NRTA Live & Learn.
This article originally appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Summer 2007, as a 60th Anniversary Extra.
