Cultural Impact and Criticism
Within Artesia, Abo Elementary School was lauded by teachers and many parents. Teachers often described Abo's students as less likely to cause trouble, more attentive, and less likely to require discipline. On the other hand, many of those same students described heightened awareness of the possibility of nuclear war, and some were terrified that they could be orphaned in the event of war. One of the most substantial fears raised by students involved the 2,160 person capacity of the school. In the event of a war, only the first 2 160 people would be allowed into the school for shelter, which would likely have left the majority of Artesia's nearly 12 000 residents, including the parents of some of Abo's students, without any shelter in the event of a nuclear attack.
Outside of Artesia, Abo Elementary School was condemned by many councils and groups, some of whom rejected the concept of an underground school entirely. Notwithstanding, the President of Artesia's Board of Education, C.P. Bunch, called the school "more a matter of insurance than fear", and expressed hope that future schools built in Artesia would follow its example. Federal studies concluded that the students suffered no long-term effects from their time in Abo, and many students who suffered from chronic allergies or asthma were transferred to Abo as its advanced air filtration systems reduced the impact of dust storms and allergens. Indeed, these studies concluded that many students' health improved as a result of extended time in the school.
Read more about this topic: Abo Elementary School
Famous quotes containing the words cultural, impact and/or criticism:
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)