BOOKS
Hechinger, Fred M. & Phillips, Robert & Taylor, Mark
been fruitful, and provide both deepened insights and helpful models for the future. Public School of Choice: A Place for the Reform of American Education MARIO D. FANTINI Simon and Schuster,...
...He had been, it should be recalled, one of the architects of New York City's school decentralization that originally so upset the oldtime religion of his fellow-professionals...
...And the repeated references to King Lear and to The Charterhouse el Parma bear scrutiny for their relation to White's own book...
...While it is perfectly true that the retraining of teachers is essential, Mr...
...For the most part, these are brief and seem pro-Joyconn...
...Further, White is a bit of a symbolist...
...Despite his excellences---and there are many--what White says of Elizabeth Hunter must finally apply to his own work, at least as evidenced in this novel: "'Elizabeth Hunter was never womanly enough, her flaws too perfectly disguised under appearance, enormous, gaping, at times agonizing flaws...
...What position do we Americans actually occupy in the human race...
...The federal system was not designed to make Congress dominant over the Presidency...
...25r) JEFFERS()NAVI: S{ ~ (;RANDRA'PID% MICH 49...
...Central to the novel is Elizabeth Hunter, the heroine (though none of White's characters are "heroic"--she is destined to remain forever a mere "hunter" after truth) who was once abandoned in the path, indeed the very eye, of a cyclon.e She survives, and achieves some measure of wisdom from the awe-full experience: "Whatever is given you to live, you alone can live, and re-live, and re-live, till it is gasped out of you...
...To me this seems fortunate because it prevents vouchers from posing a real threat to public education---but it also means that those who tout vouchers as a panacea are only deceiving their followers...
...Fantini wants instead is what amounts to an internal voucher system--not private alternatives to the public schools but a wide variety of alternatives within the public schools system and even within individual schools...
...The President, for instance, is elected by the nation, not by Congress, and the Presidency is to be subject to law, not to Congress...
...To offer pity--that's the most disgusting act of all...
...An ironical soul, Patrick What does the book of Revelation reveal...
...A former power and beauty, in the first sentence she is an old woman moaning on her bed after a stroke, and dead by book's end...
...As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., points out, the response to the "imperial Presidency" of recent times is not Congressional sovereignty...
...More misfires than direct hits...
...Carroll Stuhlmueller, James Raesa and Robert Karrls...
...Could it signify a break in the familiar trend of giving up on Benjamin Franklin and Horace Mann...
...One or two years...
...Hunter surrounded herself cannot save her-or us--from our common and solitary end...
...The second half of our question is not so easy to answer: White's technique in projecting or dramatizing this thesis...
...Being an American is not quite like being a Frenchman...
...Finally there are White's essays into stream-of-consciousness...
...Such a plan may well be essential to the rescue and preservation of the public schools...
...If I am to add some observations: 1 ) With regard to Catholic Bavaria, in 1925 the Bavarian voters rendered possible Hindenburg's election, the prelude of the seizure of power by Hitler, who only in the Catholic Bavaria (today the Bavaria of Franz Joseph Straus) could find his base of operations...
...REV...
...As to his objecting to the Munich pastoral, I think he is very right...
...Ten issues per year, $4...
...He does not invoke the magic cure-all prescribed by the radical reform movement--the voucher system that would allow parents to take their public education allowance and give it to the private schools...
...In contrast to the by now familiar critical response to a deplorable situation, Mr...
...Join the universal struggle for human dignitywthrough education, skilled trades, agriculture, engineering, business, urban planning, medicine & other fields of community development...
...He is a demiurge, looking down, pulling strings, unsmilingly...
...indochi'na " INDOCHINA CHRONICLE...
...Fantini offers, as an addendum to the book, a letter from Herbert Kohl, a more 17 May 1974:268 radical school critic, that throws something of a wet blanket on his friend's lyrical account of the alternative options in the Berkeley, Calif., school district...
...when a character is badly named Flora Manhood, we can also assume he means the name to bear symbolic freight...
...Today our full identity is grasped only when all the relations of all human cultures are known...
...June 9-14...
...Every scene seems an ordered, deliberate counterpoint to another, all of J PEACE CORPS & VISTA NEED YOU[ Volunteer your skills & experience in developing nations overseas and U.S...
...When a rare platypus, or pink sapphire, or basin of mould, make an appearance, he intends them to carry secondary significance...
...Fantini offers some sensible and workable ground rules for a system that would offer children real choice of educational patterns...
...The road to educational disappointment has too often been paved with good intentions and naive implementation...
...But Berkeley is not alone among the examples cited that have also turned out less satisfactory than their blueprint...
...B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO...
...Expenses paid-medical, travel, vacation, living...
...According to my knowledge of the situation, he has hit the right nail on the head...
...With perhaps the exception of Frau Lippman, the author shows no compassion for any of these people...
...For instance: "'Most of life is compulsion or coincidence...
...of others a step more accurately, we see the way our earlier habits of perception had been too limited--we learn something about our own deficiencies or limits...
...which are parts of a sing!e artistic whole rather than a reflection of life's chaos...
...It was, as so many other parents had long known, a case of take it because you can't leave it...
...How does one blue-glare...
...The son Basil and the daughter Dorothy are more than a bit like Shakespeare's Goneril and Regan, concerned only with the division of the kingdom rather than the verities of the heart, and Mrs...
...His descriptions give the novel a rich texture: Sentence for sentence he writes the most beautiful novelistic prose since E~izabeth Bowen...
...22] with bated breath...
...July 21-26, July 2S-August 2. Faculty of five each week...
...Yes, we think life is like that...
...The old lady foils them through an act of will, dying earlier than expected...
...But neither is it like being a Japanese...
...And the large question that takes one to a biography of Cervantes in the first place remains unanswered: why did that gaunt knight Don Quixote ever choose him to chronicle his own uncertain fortunes...
...Hunter herself could be compared with Stendahrs Contessa, a composite vision of the bellezza /olgorante [the beauty that blinds like lightning] of all the women of Stendhal's and White's dreams...
...Twelve words m,nlmum...
...Yet, what else is one to say about Mr...
...propose something other than doing away with the public schools or declaring them bankrupt and up for litigation...
...Book Sale COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS: Whale of a Sale, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded...
...You can't condemn artifice without dismissing the whole of art" . . . "A man develops only one of his several potential lives...
...No solution-traditional or progressive--would be superimposed...
...Send contributions for digging wells and saving human lives to: MISSIONARIES OF AFRICA, 1&22-21st St., N.W., Washington, D.C...
...White shows us stumble as well as sail, and he is particu: arly good describing the awkwardness of sex...
...The humanities ought to demystify pretensions...
...Yet White's attention to minutiae has its rewards...
...The latter solution was advertised as the "deschooling of society," the approximate equivalent of a promise to improve public health by means of de-doctoring society...
...The movement was born in equal parts of legitimate dissatisfaction with the qualitative decline of over-bureaucraticized public schools and the romantic notion that anything that is compulsory must ipso facto be bad...
...4) The existence of so-called Christian political parties is generally, in Germany especially, most discrediting to the Christian and particularly Catholic position...
...It seems very much to White's point that she dies upon her richly-carved, swan-entrusted mahogany commode...
...That is precisely why one wishes Mr...
...In her death as in her life, Elizabeth Hunter has the last word...
...Savings up to 90% on over 500 different books...
...And how, technically, does he manage the escape and transformation...
...Mr...
...94704...
...Families can eat you," one of White's characters says, and his novel proceeds to demonstrate just that...
...For humans, to know oneself is to know oneself as part of one branch of a family tree...
...Dig Wells 7 SUB-SAHARA COUNTRIES stricken with sever* drought...
...Total cost $100, deposit $20...
...Public schools with their traditions of experience," he writes, "are more likely to protect the next generation from these pitfalls than are the less accountable alternative private schools...
...What Mr...
...One grasps at straws...
...000 000 000 IN BRIEF CERVANTES by Richard L. Predmore, Dodd, Mead, $15...
...Although himself a professional-he is dean of education at the State University of New York at New Paltz --Mr...
...This should be an attainable goal: It is neither radical nor utopian...
...they merely allow a minimal shift of enrollment from public to private institutions by filling up the latter's empty spaces...
...Yet, he has lately delivered himself of Must We Educate?--a typical entry into the genre that says we must not, lest we impose the teachers', and society's, will on spirits that ought to remain free...
...Religion in Germany Heidelberg, Germany To the Editors: I have read Gordon C. Zahn's article, "Religion and Politics in Germany" [Feb...
...One hesitates to charge an author who is fundamentally so obviously pointing in the right direction with the fault of gullibility...
...Classified RATES: 50c a word, one time: 48c, three times: 45c, seven times...
...Still, so careful is Predmore not to speculate beyond demonstrable facts, so dependent is his whole conception on those facts, so free of intuition, that a rather bloodless portrait of his hero emerges...
...And why is their leather wounded...
...And in his "reading commentary" on Revelation, Eller approaches every passage with the question, "What is John trying to tell us about Jesus...
...Even though Mr...
...20525...
...John's University, Collegeville, Minn...
...Unlike Stendhal, for whom the surface of life had no appeal, White seems near-preoccupied with surfaces...
...Institutes SACRED SCRIPTURE: Sixth Annual Institute, August I I-I& Rays...
...It produced little more than highly repetitive debate and even more repetitive literature...
...Read in that way, Eller finds THE MOST REVEALING BOOK OF THE BIBLE does make sense...
...When Sir Basil continues drowsily smiling, "till a hair bent in one of his nostrils, making him sneeze," we recognize a writer who perceives the little annoyances of man...
...Nor does Mr...
...Fantini is ideologically far closer to the disenchanted critics of public education's monopolistic rigidities than he is to the public school establishment...
...He is too confident, too, in the establishment's readiness to depart from its appointed course...
...It is the gasping-out of Elizabeth Hunter's life which provides the novel's drama...
...Conference, June 10-13...
...The Eye of the Storm PATRICK WHITE Viking, $8.9.5 ROBERT PHILLIPS It has been remarked that in every fat man there is a thin man struggling to get out...
...Fantini have any taste for the saccharine child liberation that promises the freedom and happiness of illiteracy...
...Filtering out distracting details, the author focuses on the meaning of the book as a whole, rather than offering a verse-by-verse interpretation...
...Each one of these other cultures illumines parts of the American experience not illumined by the others...
...BIBLICAL INSTITUTE, Trinity Collage, Burlington, Vermont 0S401...
...At one point in his great novel Don Quixote discourses at some length on the relative merits of Arms and Letters, two major areas of human endeavor between which many men of the Renaissance felt themselves compelled to choose...
...The two careers--along with several more pedestrian ones like commissary and tax collector--give Cervantes, like Byron, a natural fascination for biographers, and so in a profusely and handsomely illustrated book Richard Predmore (author of a superb critical study, The World o~ Don Quixote) tells once again the sad story of Cervantes' five years in prison in Algiers, his frequent and prolonged separation from his family, the final and total rejection by his daughter, the struggle for patronage and recognition, and the periods of great poverty alternating with periods of yet greater poverty...
...Journal on Vietnam, LaDs, Cambodia...
...Their notion is to shunt her off to a "Home," and thereby deprive her of her own home...
...Information: Bruce Mazzie, ACTION, OCP Box P-5, Washington, D.C...
...Issues on Paris Agreement, PRG, etc...
...He documents every drop of dew on the rose, every mote of dust in the air...
...Contact Rev...
...Write: Linus Ascheman, O.S.B., INSTITUTE FOR MENTAL HEALTH, St...
...Now Reuss would create what amounts to a recall petition and referendum for the President, with the power of petition vested not in the people, but in Congress, a separate and often competing and even hostile branch of government...
...20001...
...With disarming honesty, Mr...
...3) Today, e.g., the abortion theme for the Catholic political group is less a serious moral problem than a means to overthrow the hateful Social-Democratic government...
...Fantini when he declares his faith in Richard Nixon's verbal commitment to the "reform," and "renewal," of American education...
...Proposals have ranged from the use of public school funds to send the children off to non-public schools to not sending them to school at all...
...Sister Wanted SISTER WANTED for pastoral team, University of Oklahoma parish...
...MURPHY CENTER...
...The blood they lack is White's own, and if they are less than human, it is because he seems less than humane...
...This latter pair have come back to Australia at last, not to see their dying mother, but to protect what will soon be their inheritance by preventing her from "squandering" it on personal comforts in her old age...
...Writing primarily for the layman, Vernard Eller offers a fresh approach to a book that is often regarded as mysterious and confusing...
...Those of us who wish Mr...
...He is particularly good at recording our most embarrassing moments, as when Sir Basil makes a pass at Sister Manhood: Probably on account of the twinge throwing him slightly off balance, he caught hold of a handful of flesh she wasn't proud of (it was superfluous) above her right hip...
...INSTITUTE FOR MENTAL HEALTH...
...Fantini was driven to "the conclusion that something was wrong when he found the school authorities determined to bend his son's mind to fit the requirements of the fixed plan of operations rather than vice versa...
...Fantini tends to be too confident in the power of positive blueprints...
...White's thesis in this fat (but not bloated) novel is simply this: We are all alone in a chaotic world, and only we ourselves can help ourselves during our brief tenure...
...nor, again (even if one is black) like being a Nigerian...
...Even the Hunter family's trusted old solicitor, in the end, is revealed as a thief...
...9 Lltnrgy CHRISTIAN INITIATION: adult catechumanata and its ritual;zatlon...
...Not Miguel 17 May 1974:270 de Cervantes, though, who followed long service as a warrior with his literary vocation, and who was patriotically or perversely proud, till the end, of the crippled hand that he had earned in the battle of Lepanto...
...Bill has shown--that vouchers do not create new alternatives...
...The answer is happily that it could, particularly since Mr...
...2 Commonweal: 269 White seems to be saying that all the art and artifice with which Mrs...
...42c, thirteen times...
...Cost-of-tuition vouchers simply are not enough to finance the creation of new non-public alternatives...
...Fantini knows--as the experience of the G.I...
...THE MOST REVEALING BOOK OF THE BIBLE: Making Sense out of Revelation by VERNARD ELLER 232 pages, paper $4.95 At your bookstore or write WM...
...But what Revelation is intended to reveal, says Eller, is simply "the gospel, the good news of who Jesus Christ is and what he accomplishes...
...He is not, to begin with, an instinctive, non-analytical writer, an objective realist or a subjectiveromanticist...
...Fantini well because he has accurately diagnosed the self-destructive rigidities of the public school system can only hope that reform-minded readers of his book will be sufficiently sophisticated to pursue his vision without the author's one serious weakness-- the theoretician's tendency to place trust in those who promise much without the accompanying commitment to deliver...
...73069...
...Leading titles in Political Science, World Literature, Philosophy, etc...
...There's no reason why he shouldn't live them all...
...White pricks at the surface, but never succeeds in stripping away whole layers...
...If we apply this image to the big new novel by recent Nobel Laureate Patrick White, we find ourselves asking, what private personality and ideas is White attempting to release and express in this 600-page opus...
...Write for catalog: Dept, CC, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, P.O...
...S~321...
...INDOCHINA RESOURCE CENTER, P.O...
...Fantini ought also to know that few of his fellow deans of education match his willingness to be unorthodox...
...5) The state of things becomes very well illustrated by the difference between the German and the French bishops, if it refers, e.g., to helping the Chileans suffering under suppression...
...Fantini could offer expert proof that a more open, informal approach to his son would indeed produce better results, the system would not accommodate him, even though there were a substantial number of other parents who would have opted for such an alternative...
...Write: Director...
...and Basil Hunter looked angry that his technique should let him down, converting a smooth pass into what must look an act of vulgar clumsiness...
...Public School of Choice: A Place for the Reform of American Education MARIO D. FANTINI Simon and Schuster, $8.95 FRED M. HECHINGER For the better part of a decade, proposals for the reform of public education have with dreary regularity been calling for the destruction of the public schools...
...Others are predators who hinder rather than help...
...A most recent example is Carl Bereiter who, having contributed some admirable ideas and programs for the teaching of disadvantaged children, should know better...
...The sound and attractive concept is theoretically not in conflict with what so many educators profess--that they are dedicated to the recognition of individual differences and committed to paying attention to those differences...
...After all the fascinating descriptions and adroit aphorisims, White's characters while not quite types, are exceedingly thin of blood...
...Occasionally the texture is too rich, a bit like over-indulgence in chocolate mousse, as when White describes certain young females as "blue-glaring out of their wounded leather...
...The central theme of Public Schools of Choice is too persuasive to be saddled with ballast of deceptive political rhetoric...
...Fantini does not urge that the public schools be dismantled...
...they would be "a matter of choice for all participants--teachers, parents and students...
...Although Cervantes is "popular" biography, more or less, Predmore is meticulous in his scholarship and on certain important points he does set the record straight: Cervantes never had a university education, and he was not jailed in Seville in 1601'or 1602 for what would have been the second time there...
...Phone 40J3-321-0990...
...Phrase after phrase cries out to be underlined, memorized...
...The sated and wary reviewer should therefore be forgiven for being tempted to greet Mario D. Fantini's Public Schools o[ Choice with skepticism or a stifled yawn...
...TheVatican intheAge of the Dictators (1922-1945) ANTHONY RHODES "Remarkable for its balance and detachment...
...ALFON$ BElL 0 0 0 0 0 0000 Mtchael Novak (Cont...
...Box 81, Notre Dame, lad...
...2) The fateful and humiliating part of the Zentrum, the predecessor of the CDU/CSU, in granting Hitler his totalitarian "emergency" powers, is duly characterized by Mr...
...46556...
...Regrettably, this admirable theory has consistently run up against the administrator's credo---to seek and impose what Elwood Cubberley, the administrators' patron saint, established long ago as the fixed goal for generations of public school managers: "the one best way...
...Box 4000-D, Berkeley, Calif...
...MARK TAYLOR 000 000 000 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued ]rom page 251) mentary system, creates separate and competing branches of government, deliberately building a balance of conflict and cooperation into the system so no branch may dominate another (as Hamilton said, in the quote misused by Reuss...
...In between, she and the reader review her life through a series of flashbacks as well as the reminiscences of an incredibly large, Dickensian cast of nurses, servants, housekeepers, solicitors, lovers--plus her own son and daughter, a knighted actor and a beknighted princess...
...Fantini to be slightly more realistically critical of those alternatives he cites as examples and more realistic, too, concerning the obstacles he is sure to encounter...
...Box 195, Irvlngton, N.Y...
...REV,) DANIEL A. DEGNAN, S.J...
...WRIGHT, MURPHYO'CONNOR, SUEI.ZER, COLLINS, MINEAR...
...Joe Ross, Box Ill6, Norman, Okla...
...Write Sister Marlanna, COLLEGE MISERICORDIA, Dallas, Pannsylvanla IB612...
...WPASHINGTON POST/ BOOK f f ' O R l . l ) "[The author's] purpose is to examine motives and expose facts: and this he does with discernment and clarity, drawing on material newly available" -- C03iMONWEAL "Careful and utterly dispassionate . . . . with [a] marvelous sense of fairness...
...THE NEW REPUBLIC $12.50 at all bookstores OlD Holt, Rinehart & Winsto~IW Commonweal: 271...
...And yet, there was a glimmer of hope that this "plan for the reform of American education" might, as the title suggests...
...Water urgently needed for drinking, cooking bathing irrigating...
...IOS33...
...What it does not intend to reveal is "secret information regarding the when and how of events from the hidden future...
...For box numbers add ~0: per insertion...
...Could this book be a positive proposal...
...A further attribute of White's technique is the sheer epigrammatic quality of his prose...
...Zahn...
...Workshops in Psychiatry and Religion...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 11
