Letters
LETTERS to the Editor CIO, RIP Your Comment "CIO, RIP" (April issue) sounds like spectator journalism. It certainly wasn't written by any trade unionist whose plant is about to be shot out from...
...The repression is the workers' fault, he claims, for advancing disastrous and unreasonable demands...
...He also says no educator has ever contradicted him...
...If people want prayer in the school, let 'em have it as long as those who want secular humanism, or socialism, or whatever, can have what they want...
...And for how long has society been unresponsive to women's needs...
...This is a bankrupt ideology...
...Edd Doerr Silver Spring, Maryland Adozen years ago, I was impelled by John Holt's critical writings to spend a summer vacation independently researching scientifically objective studies that might convincingly answer the question, "What really helps kids learn...
...Of all the statistical variables involved, whether money, strict or loose discipline, team or self-contained teaching, many aids or spartan surroundings, only one factor could be isolated as having real significance in increasing learning: the teacher...
...Beryl Sederberg Elk River, Minnesota Solidarity When the Polish people organize themselves to demand self-management of their own lives and are met with repression and martial law by a government that has never represented their interests, Sidney Lens plays the apologist...
...And as for such a free-for-all being a problem, I know, after more than three decades of college teaching, that one cannot assume any common background in the students who come to us now, so we certainly don't need bureaucracies running schools just for the sake of "common background...
...Dan Schapiro Urbana, Illinois Ifound myself rather irritated by Judith Paterson's article...
...We have been pleased with the cars and have never had a gasket problem...
...Lens is obviously a socialist, but he is a socialist "from the top down...
...This is essentially his line in "Second Act in the Second World" (March issue...
...It certainly wasn't written by any trade unionist whose plant is about to be shot out from under him or her, nor by anybody who has seriously worried about the epidemic of plant shutdowns and the shift of jobs to cheap labor countries...
...If the idea that our President should stay at Motel 6 and send an extra hundred bucks to Poland is your notion of how our country should be run, well, in the words of an old oinker, "I would rather be a pig than Socrates, because when Socrates is long gone, there will still be plenty of us pigs around...
...Dominance in the form of control is an attribute we need to minimize...
...Life without Milton Mayer lacks a special flavor, a flavor I've missed in the past year...
...Our first activity was to insert an article in our town warrant for vote at the April town meeting, calling upon our selectpersons to instruct our government representatives, our President, and the presidents of all nations armed with nuclear weapons, that the citizens of our town support an immediate freeze on the development, manufacturing, and deployment of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems...
...I am now using my freedom of speech by urging all to refuse to register and refuse to serve...
...I hope The Progressive will exert its usual peace activism and evaluate its recent coverage of the abortion issue...
...In its place we must nurture an attitude of responsibility for birth control...
...Blacks today, despite all the raw deals they have gotten, support public education even more strongly than whites...
...We now have two of them and have driven them for a combined mileage of almost 140,000 miles...
...The feeling of loss of control needs to be examined...
...In the past fifteen years, schemes to provide tax aid or support for nonpublic schools have been decisively rejected in every statewide referendum and most national, regional, and Congressional district polls...
...Especially a teacher with high verbal skill...
...So, workers increasingly are willingly—and by their vote—accepting bargains to save their jobs, get some guarantees on income and fewer plant shutdowns, while others chase butterflies...
...Paterson seems to be sympathetic to men who are worried about losing control over the women with whom they are involved...
...Despite tax revolts and hard times, about half of all public school tax levies and bond issues are passed...
...I know several feminists who refuse to subscribe to The Progressive over the issue of abortion...
...Curriculum and all the rest of it should be determined by whatever group of teachers or parents wants to set up a school...
...In the only statewide referendum on vouchers, Michigan voters routed the plan 3-to-l in 1978...
...I recently met with a group of citizens in my town who share a great concern for disarmament...
...We understand that similar actions are taking place in hundreds of municipalities throughout New England and the United States...
...Such reactionary negativism fits poorly within The Progressive's covers...
...I believe The Progressive would do well to make more effort on this...
...Other polls have shown that a solid majority of parents believe their children are getting a better education in public schools today than they received a generation ago...
...I wish I could more adequately share with you all that I learned that summer, for it helped me understand that John Holt's books, among others, are destructive to the really valiant efforts often seen in our schools...
...The right of a woman to choose a safe and legal abortion is among the most important issues of our time...
...Public schools do such a poor job, private or populist schools could hardly do worse...
...A truly free people would tell the State to keep its hands off the content of education...
...That reforms are not made easily simply testifies to the fact that the world is not a simple place...
...It asked for a referendum on whether the communist government should remain, but it never said what it would replace it with—assuming the government would have permitted such a referendum...
...Left and can deal with extremes of violence on the same plane...
...Paul Huston Kent, Ohio Thank God Rover has come home...
...Franklin Wallick Editor UA W Washington Report Washington, D. C. Rover's Return It is because of ridiculous articles like Milton Mayer's "Staying with the Reagans" (Reflections, March issue) that I am terminating my subscription...
...My 1972 Subaru maintenance schedule calls for the head bolts to be retorqued at 1,000 and 12,000 miles after it comes from the factory...
...George LaForest Rockford, Illinois Iwas glad to see "Reinventing the World," by Samuel H. Day Jr...
...The level of debate, of style, of taste, of content must be raised in the United States, not lowered...
...Certainly he wants a "democratic" socialism, in which the working class "participates," but only within the guidelines laid down by the intellectual and bureaucratic elites who represent no one but themselves...
...The Progressive has waged many important battles, but it has pretty much neglected the goal of a new political global system...
...It seemed to me, however, that the article glossed over Schell's main thesis that a new global political system is essential...
...On a tactical level, you alienate many whom you need as allies...
...I am absolutely opposed to laws giving prospective fathers veto power over abortion...
...Your "gripe sheet" gets better and better...
...Can anyone point to a single movement based on this concept that hasn't degenerated...
...I suspect that many of Solidarity's leaders, given a choice between humanistic socialism and capitalism, would choose capitalism...
...She uses anti-abortion language throughout her article...
...Both of our cars had heads removed after many miles for valve work, but the head bolts were again retorqued periodically...
...Nolan evidently can not distinguish, as I hope I do, between a union and its leadership, and between what is correct in principle and what is poorly implemented in tactics...
...Congratulations, too, to The Progressive for urging people not to register for the draft...
...I hailed the emergence of Solidarity, but I was and am critical of its leadership for having muffed a chance to establish a decentralized worker self-management system in Poland...
...I believe the central unifying factor is a lifestyle of nonviolence...
...Russell Karkowski Solon, Iowa There are some areas where reasonable distinctions between the sexes need to be made, and this is one of them...
...These people have been able to overcome the rhetoric of Right vs...
...It is important that we know of one another and become aware of our shared purpose...
...It is difficult to imagine that the issues of abortion and war were once separate for me...
...Both are models in the danger area as specified by Alan Ramo's article, "If You Knew What Subaru Knew, You'd Blow a Gasket" (March issue...
...Just as we are denied access to the means of production, we are denied access to the means of education (except through elections which seem always to serve special interests...
...Let's free up those who can do something right and end the tyranny of the lovers of conformity...
...I would not be so kind should our paths happen to cross...
...The Campaign for World Government has been working for a democratic world federation since 1937...
...Just who are the anti-choice supporters...
...April issue), society may be unresponsive to men's needs, but who is responsible for maintaining a culture that idolizes the dominant male and the submissive female...
...A problem for many teachers, in fact, is balancing their emotional commitment to their students with their emotional commitment to their families, with their families often getting short-changed...
...It is hoped that this new movement will be the universal equivalent of the "bishops as peacemakers" role Jones wrote about...
...Kay Boyle Cottage Grove, Oregon Coverage Anumber of The Progressive's, cover designs displease me, but the latest (April) issue forces me to express extreme dislike...
...I explored every innovative program from New York City's "Higher Horizons" to ancient Greek educational methods, always searching for proven results...
...It is important that the head be kept tight to avoid gasket failure...
...Such phrases as "destruction of his offspring," "destruction of the 'magical gift,' " "undeniably a death experience," are all heavily loaded ways of talking about abortion...
...Dennis Demmel Hartington, Nebraska The Schools John Egerton's informative piece and John Holt's peev-ishone on public schools ("Can We Save the Schools...
...Earl E. Sittler Marion, Massachusetts My congratulations to James Bergeron for his courage in attending a German peace rally in his U.S...
...If the ERA means a pregnant woman will have to get the consent of the prospective father in order to obtain an abortion, I join Phyllis Schlafly in saying, "Stop ERA...
...And how can anyone imply that workers' self-management is anything but the most progressive and revolutionary demand possible...
...Annual opinion surveys sponsored by Phi Delta Kappa have shown that 80 per cent of public school parents rate the schools from OK to excellent, with dissatisfaction concentrated among minority parents in inner-city school districts...
...I'm going to start waiting on the doorstep again for The Progressive to come...
...How can anyone fault Solidarity for demanding that the control of the economy be taken out of the hands of those who have handled it so self-servingly...
...Paul L. Demler Jamestown, New York Subaru Gasket My wife and I have driven Subaru autos since 1975...
...Wayne Cooke Spanaway, Washington Ifind myself on John Holt's side...
...The greatest advantage, though, might well be that those who are capable of creating humane, creative, stimulating, productive schools would be free to do so, which is not the case now...
...With parents free to send kids to whatever school they wanted, the problems of school district boundaries, of busing, of tax-base inequities, would all disappear...
...Army uniform (Comment, March issue...
...And I am not a Reaganite...
...Karen Moshewitz Indianapolis, Indiana Arthur Jones's "O Washington" column in the March issue reminded me of the first annual conference of "Prolifers for Survival," which brought together the likes of John Shiel of the White House Five, mentioned by Jones, for the purpose of uniting the right-to-life and peace movements as fundamentally consistent activities...
...The public schools have given us plenty of that...
...I am sure that those 5,000 educators failed to respond to Holt's claim out of politeness...
...Channing B. Richardson Clinton, New York Iwant to congratulate you on the current cover...
...Work for such a system, while unachieved, is far from being "just begun...
...I know I can go to the jug for this, but any such penalty will only prove that all government talk of free speech is deliberate falsehood...
...If a woman becomes pregnant by me, my life is not interrupted, my body doesn't change, my health isn't threatened...
...It should merely collect and disburse funds so that funding is equitable, nationwide...
...I was in the Army for four and one-half years during World War II, with two years in the Southwest Pacific area...
...As you so aptly put it in your Comment "Don't Sign, Don't Serve" (March issue), strength in numbers is the key to making a difference...
...Instead of seeing such a loss as negative, men should be capable of relinquishing control...
...They were crushed, temporarily I hope, by the forces of reaction...
...The public schools are not responsive to the people, and were never designed to be...
...As for Judith Paterson's article, "Whose Freedom of Choice...
...They were demanding a whole new social order...
...If people can commit their lives to nonviolence, then everything else will fall in line...
...Reflections, April issue), discussing Jonathan Schell's important series in The New Yorker...
...However, the reactions reported in the article were unsettling...
...He wants "democracy," but only if it is controlled by those who know best, not by the masses responsible for making society run in the first place...
...I do not doubt that men have strong feelings concerning abortion and the dilemmas it presents...
...Laurence G. Wolf Cincinnati, Ohio John Holt asserts in The Progressive and in his book, Teach Your Own, that "with very few exceptions, the social life of schools and classrooms is mean-spirited, competitive, snobbish, status oriented, cruel, and violent...
...We understand the strength of numbers and know that the power inherent in them can be actualized only if those making up the numbers are aware of one another...
...March issue) overlooked several important points...
...It shows Ronald Reagan as he really is—not the affable, smiling good fellow we see on the television screen, but a real monster, a man who is robbing the poor people on welfare and Social Security to fatten a bloated military budget...
...Teachers today, from my twenty-four-year perspective, are more dedicated and better qualified than ever before...
...Yet readers of your magazine find not one word regarding the disastrous consequences of the Hatch Amendment, the Human Life Statute, or the Human Life Amendment...
...I once supported the Equal Rights Amendment, but now I have second thoughts...
...We were told that we were defending freedom of speech...
...With 16,000 local school districts run by elected local boards, our public schools can be improved if parents, citizens, and taxpayers really want to improve them...
...I think all people should support Bergeron and should urge that none give military service...
...It is tragic to alienate such a large group of the most progressive people in the country in this manner...
...Polish workers were certainly not demanding a road to capitalism (as Lens's words "free market" imply...
...Presumably, this is the antithesis of what The Progressive stands for...
...Although Subaru may well have been withholding lifesav-ing information from the public, The Progressive could have done a better job of public information...
...Many of us are also wearing a blue armband as a symbol, a public statement of concern for nuclear disarmament...
...Nineteenth Century workers and immigrants clamored for public schools as the best way to get ahead...
...They are people like Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Jerry Falwell who also support Reaganomics, a strong defense, imperialism abroad, and who oppose civil rights...
...I can't imagine justifying an equal say in the decision on whether or not the woman should have an abortion by virtue of my "generous" donation of a sperm...
...Elizabeth T. Williams Salisbury, Connecticut Your April cover: no need for that kind of smear...
...Georgia Lloyd Glencoe, Illinois...
...John Kotsakis Chicago Teachers Union Chicago, Illinois Peace Work The nuclear disarmament issue is the subject of increasing concern throughout this country and throughout the world...
...Members are a unique coalition of nonsectar-ian individuals who believe that human life, from the womb to the tomb, is of the highest value...
...I am also critical of the leadership because it moved too close to the Church and because it failed to express a political philosophy...
...Sidney Lens Chicago, Illinois Abortion Iam becoming increasingly disturbed by The Progressive's at best ambiguous position on abortion...
...We've cried and bellowed about this problem, and far too many politicians, including those on the Left, have been chasing butterflies while jobs have been destroyed...
...Readers could continue to be happy with their Subaru models if told that one major step to avoiding the head gasket blowing is the periodic tightening of head bolts as suggested in the maintenance schedule...
...Paterson does little to move us from "mindless political polarization...
...Dean Nolan Chicago, Illinois The author replies: Dean Nolan distorts what I wrote about Poland...
...In the only referendum on tuition tax credits, District of Columbia voters, most of them black, LETTERS to the Editor clobbered the scheme 9-to-l in 1981...
...Regardless of how poor a President may lead our country, his position demands that his physical surroundings represent the best of the American way of life...
...My approach would not end the problems of dogmatism, authoritarianism, and the cultivation of mediocrity, for if that's what some parents want, that's what they would get...
...I did not say the repression of Solidarity was "the workers' fault," nor did I say I wanted socialism in Poland "within the guidelines" of the communist bureaucracy...
Vol. 46 • May 1982 • No. 5
