Letters

...I had two purposes in running as a Democrat: to avoid having my campaign labeled "merely educational," and to make peace an election issue in other states through press attention to my surprise nomination in June...

...D. Park Teter Leesburg, Virginia Arab Christians Michael H. Seitz's review of Circle of Deceit ("Small Pleasures," March issue) was well written, but there was one error that irritated me...

...You provide a great service to people who want to know what's what—but as the times get tougher, I think there's another ingredient The Progressive needs to add: proof of hope...

...An editing error gave the mistaken impression that Brandt's thinking was swayed by the Venezuelan Democratic Action Party...

...almost always sounds worked up...

...First, the American oil industry is hardly a creature of free enterprise...

...The illustrations implied that the article might at least allude to the rights of the only human form sketched in full: the fetus...

...In reporting the realities against which we need to be well armed with information, you are arming us so well with dreadful facts that it is getting harder to find the balance from which we have the strength and the will to remain on the front...

...The point is not to "change the system...

...Walsh's inquiry was an eloquent example of the right thing to do, and I can only hope it is widely read by our brothers and sisters, between sessions of their conferences on "consensus-building...

...Did Erik offer to relieve his now discredited lover of the responsibility of keeping and raising that child...

...Bruce Majors National Secretary Students for a Libertarian Society Washington, D.C...

...Everyone so earnest, so right about things—and everyone else so beyond the pale...

...It is unreasonable to expect the schools to be so much better than the society of which they are a part...

...He flails away at "Bible and catechism...

...Parents can choose from several nearby high schools, and the systems work well...

...Did they speak only to the teachers suffering from "burnout...

...Since the woman obviously was opposed to abortion, did he offer to accept full and continuing responsibility for his progeny...

...However, the truly revealing aspect of Egerton's statement emerges when we consider that most tax credit advocates have never placed initiatives on the ballot to abolish government schools...

...I urge The Progressive to include in your powerful publication a regular offering of information or positive philosophy to better equip the responsible people who count on your magazine for the truth to be, literally and effectively, progressive...

...Somehow a wall goes up around any such self-congratulatory action group., and suddenly heels are dug in on the part of the opposing army, who are often easy prey to cheap shots...

...The human spirit needs some food—real nourishment which, I suggest, could be found in regular news of existing programs and possibilities for positive action to offset the tiring stance of mere holding out...

...If there were tax credits for alternative education, no professional licensing, and no rules against home teaching, education could take place in the home and the neighborhood—where oil cannot usually be found...

...The lessons we learn there are also the lessons we need to begin talking more powerfully about favela, barrio, and ghetto...

...Here in Vermont, we have some limited voucher systems in effect in towns which do not have their own high schools...

...Sylvia Kahn North Hollywood, California Was the incongruity between the article "Whose Freedom of Choice...

...B. T. Pepper Chapel Hill, North Carolina Correction Lucy Komisar's Datelines article, "Sandinista, Stay Home" (May issue), should have made it clear that Socialist International President Willy Brandt refused to let the group meet if the Sandinistas could not attend...

...But, we also are required to accept any student who arrives on our doorstep...

...It is hard to see how education could be monopolized, even in the Marxist model, when it can be done at home, or by someone on one's own block...

...It's a good line, the idea that the Left needs to pay attention to the contours of real American existence...

...It is probably only an apparent paradox that American writing, coming out of a culture supposedly devoted to mobility and for-getfulness of the past, often gets its best effects in memoirs of ordinary lives, and particularly meditations on fatherhood and sonship...

...Howard, chronologically more mature, "preferred certain life risks to abortion...

...it feeds upon itself...

...Give us all the information you now give, but please add to our ability to make progress into a safer world, or perhaps simply progress toward saving it even as it is...

...As for Jeb's anguish over not having "the relationship, the love, the pleasure he might be sharing with the child (always imagined as a boy)," I recommend the nearest adoption agency...

...There is a frankly Hegelian job to be done: The Left has to recover itself in the alienation represented by an immersion in our people...

...At the same time, we make ourselves into the sort of people that Third World villagers—inside and outside our country—like and respect least: people without a village...

...The real task is to oppose the totalitarian tendencies in society...

...It should have referred to a Maronite or Falangist village...

...I did not think The Progressive's contributors usually took such a hard line on these issues...

...There are many, many children in legal and emotional limbo who are desperate for such concern and commitment...

...This elegy, this message of despair, this message of hope, is like a burst of trumpets, and I think Walsh has hit on the ultimate answer to solving our problems—each of us to stop being so smug...

...This is the banner that has waved over every show-trial and Gulag of our century...

...Yet the only alternative he' offered the expectant mother, "a woman he mistrusted" and who would raise his child in a foreign culture, was abortion...

...Which leads me (and Walsh in the piece) to the best thing he says...

...Alice Blodgett Stowe, Vermont Hope Iadmire The Progressive's clear, bold stands in presenting a view of reality which the mainstream press avoids...

...Second, education and oil are not similarly produced...

...Every time a new "failure" is discovered, school officials admit it, then cry for greater funds to be able to correct this "failure...

...To Davis, the essence of tough-minded realism is "looking evil in the eye and seeing that the eye is blue...

...Manfred Smith Columbia, Maryland t is quite true that dictatorial attitudes are to be found in some schools...

...School reform helps keep the schools the successful experiment that they are...

...It is what we precisionists of the Left call his "line...

...The recovery of meaning is the real alternative to modern civilization's drift toward nuclear suicide...

...Bobbie Bowden Schenectady, New York Salvation In his review of Robert Stone's new novel, A Flag for Sunrise, Rod Davis asserts (May issue) that Stone shuns hard political reality and "retreats into religious symbolism...

...and the accompanying graphics intentional...

...He imputes to Stone the belief that "all political systems create their own problems [and] that we can expect no salvation on Earth...

...I have never yet met an American whom American journalism has given me the least aid in understanding...

...Private schools accepting publicly financed vouchers also would, in effect, be raising money by force or the threat of force, and should be required to accept any student with the price of admission...

...The examples with which she opens her discussion, however, are puzzling from someone who declares herself to be a feminist...

...I would like to correct one misunderstanding in Jones's otherwise very understanding article...

...As a parent and teacher, I am acutely aware of the harm that our society perpetrates on our children in the form of schools...

...Within these walls many of us, as teachers, act as mediators between the alienation students experience from the routinized, mechanical, technological world and the estrangement they often feel from their families...

...Senator from Virginia on a platform of unilateral disarmament ("O Washington," April issue), Arthur Jones observed that this candidate "has no money and no job, drives a borrowed pick-up, and goes deeper into debt each time he fills the gas tank...

...I found John Holt's letter to be a far more accurate description of the situation in our schools—all of them...

...John Holt shirks this task to make a scapegoat of the schools...

...Reformers are usually welcome in the schools because along with their ideas about "equality" or "creativity" comes Federal funding or grant money...

...To Lewis, whose masculinity is "violated" by the privilege of abortion, as well as to all the other gentlemen, I recommend Perdita Huston's Third World Women Speak Out...

...When they went in, did they speak only to those students hanging out at the front entrance or those who were skipping classes...

...School reform is a social disease...

...A new pitch—with some sort of anti-smug device...

...After reading three pages of analysis and diatribe about school failure, it came as a real shocker to discover that Egerton's solution to a catalogue of complaints was more of the same...

...Does Howard need another's weakness and infirmity to help him foster his feelings of masculinity...

...I wish to say in addition that you have given me the term I was seeking— "bourgeois baiting"—to describe what worries me...

...Alas, after Jones wrote his article I had to cancel a speech to the Democratic Committee in Petersburg, Virginia, because I did not have funds to get there and back...

...The second-best thing about the piece, I thought, was its tone: a little flip, a bit nervous and guilty, the real accents of American self-doubt...

...Many Palestinians are Christians, and there are bishops and archbishops who are PLO officers...

...Good writing often chases what we don't have instead of naively reflecting what we do have...

...At first I thought I had no choice but to quit the Senate race...

...The exact opposite is the case: Because coincidences are not produced by chance, the classical idea of an external, objective, physical universe is an "untenable hypothesis...

...Egerton said elsewhere in his article, "Public education, for all its flaws and shortcomings, is the nearest thing we have to a publicly owned and operated institution devoted to the general welfare...

...Congratulations to those men who feel responsibility for the consequences of their actions...

...The Left to the Right, the Right to the Universe, the Godless to the Electronic Church, the Nature Conservancy to the Ski-mobilers—the whole trigger to disharmony is the wrinkled nose, the pitying smile, the gathering together of any well-meaning group, no matter how reasonable, responsible, literate, enlightened, concerned for human fulfillment and the Earth's continued duration...

...The sentence read, "The Palestinian Arabs retaliate with the butchering of a Christian village...

...Failure and reform are old buddies...

...In this respect, they reflect totalitarian tendencies in the society at large...

...Have Holt or Egerton been in a public school lately...

...Jon Spayde San Francisco, California Iam writing to thank you for Lawrence Walsh's "Fathers and Sons...

...Any wonder that we are left talking to ourselves, even when we do our best to leave ideological buzzwords out of our talk...

...I have thought these things at Planned Parenthood meetings...

...By November, it will give me a plurality in a three-way race against conservative opponents...

...April issue), she cites Neil Bernstein's and Richard Epstein's sensitive and acute analyses of the complexities of men's possible responses to abortion...

...Unlike reformers, Holt clearly sees the damage that the existence of schools causes our children...

...Egerton was revealing when he said, in response to advocates of education tax credits like myself, "Note what an irony is embedded in the notion that so-called free and competitive enterprise— the folks who brought us Exxon, Ma Bell, Texaco—might bring salvation to a publicly owned and operated school system...

...Your articles overwhelmingly present only the grim truths that are sending even veterans of the long haul into the trenches of fear, anger, and anguish...

...But it is Davis who turns out to be the real religious sentimentalist—of a type far too common on the Left...

...At poetry readings (at least poems-of-social-protest readings, when discussions follow...

...It was impossible to travel the state organizing for the Democratic meetings in April that choose delegates to the party's June nominating convention, but by running as an independent candidate I can—and will— stay in the race until November...

...Edward M. Corbett Commerce, Texas The Schools The exchange between John Egerton and John Holt ("Can We Save the Schools...

...But when he spells out the contrast between Stone's alleged political hangups and his own purported tough-mindedness, the truth is revealed...

...Does Egerton mean to say that he opposes a mix of governmentally and privately owned firms competing with each other, and favors government monopolization of the entire industry (in this case, education) instead...

...Anyway, no more demon-ology...

...Viable sperm is not the only test of manhood...

...Did they bother to attend classes with the great majority of students and see, hear, and feel what was happening...

...One of the best hidden secrets about the "failure" of schools is their success...

...Public schools can take money from property owners by force—that is, impose taxes...

...I am not interested in school reform, and neither, I might add, is any third-grader...

...If our mines or our manufacturing plants were so owned and operated, we would properly call them socialist...

...Against this premise (which would strike most people as plain common sense) he objects that sympathy for a revolution requires one to "discard bourgeois skepticism and face the need for what the revolution requires...

...They learn that life isn't always fair, but that groups have fought in the past to make the world a better place in which to live...

...And I have contempt for the conventional wisdom that says a candidate must spend a fortune...

...Eric Wexler Evanston, Illinois Abortion At the conclusion of Judith Paterson's article, "Whose Freedom of Choice...

...At first sight, his anti-religious pose is impeccable...

...In my mind I see wave after wave of school reformers trying out their particular ideas upon the schools (which give the appearance of responding) only to discover that they have been replaced by the next new wave of reformers coming up the ladder...

...But the schools involved have to accept any student who chooses to attend them...

...Because we are unconsciously creating the "real" world, it is, like a dream, full of meaning...

...revolution] and not with what is dead [i.e...

...Real, free-wheeling, intellectually stimulating classes do occur...

...Iam inclined to think some form of voucher system might be useful, but all proposals I have seen so far have lacked a critical provision...

...He said I refer to my view that the observer unconsciously creates the coincidences and chances in his own life as my "untenable hypothesis...

...anti-Watt banquets in Burlington, and so on...

...Tracey M. Wilson West Hartford, Connecticut John Egerton was honest enough to list most of the criticisms of the "official" history of government schools (as taught in government schools), made by writers such as John Holt and Joel Spring, but he did omit the most damning part of that history— the fact that much of the campaigning for universal compulsory governmental education in the early part of this century was led by the Ku Klux Klan, which wanted to eliminate Catholic education...

...Such responsibility must be supported and encouraged, however, by a clear grasp of present and future realities, and not by sentimental twaddle...

...He was more concerned with his self-image as "father" and "protector" than with the possibility of a life of suffering and limitations which the offspring would have to bear...

...Realists on the Left have never been taken in by such religious manifestations, but whenever an Orwell or a Son-tag has tried to expose them there has always been a throng of worshippers like Davis to pronounce the ritual curse on "bourgeois skepticism...

...Of course there are no easy solutions—but there are moves left to us, and more if we work together in positively oriented networks for change...

...but rather to abolish it...

...they do foster a certain amount of competition among the schools desiring tuition money from incoming students...

...But the arms race is not quitting...

...If we had a system of tax credits or vouchers in the United States, it would simply shift our educational system from the type of socialist industry found in the Soviet Union or Cuba to the type of mixed competitive system found in certain industries in Yugoslavia, China, or the socialist nations in Western Europe...

...As it turns out, both these objectives have already been achieved by a national peace movement that is gaining tremendous momentum...

...I would by no means insist that all is perfectly fine with the public schools, but neither is it necessary or productive to dwell only on the negative...

...Frightening, then, to think that the only people we can reach are those whom capitalism has rendered rootless, denatured...

...Erik, the young law student, didn't want "his 'seed' going into life without him...

...and the compulsive, time-wasting trappings of Catholic soul-searching" and instructs Stone to "deal with what is born [i.e...

...In history class, students are exposed to the bias in textbooks, the ruthless treatment LETTERS to the Editor of Native Americans, the struggle of several waves of immigrants, the continued fight for equality by black Americans and women, the effects of the labor movement on our economy, and the vagaries of war in the Twentieth Century...

...Here waves the banner of the true believer—a bit tattered from the winds of history, but still triumphantly intact...

...The lyrico-meditative tone many American memoirists adopt (where are the baseball caps of yesteryear...

...Everyone can agree with this on the surface, but the irreducible (or at least so-far-irreduced) adolescentism of many of us is always getting in the way...

...religion...

...Richard Andrews Andover, Vermont Nuclear Suicide In his article about my campaign for U.S...

...Frank B. Doherty Chicago, Illinois Unlike John Egerton in his rejoinder to John Holt, I do not feel Holt's criticism of the public schools is either clear or of quality...

...Walsh manages to convey the uneasy continuity into the present of his relationship with his father and its meanings, without implying that the meanings can be settled and then contemplated, wistfully...

...March issue) was yet another reminder of the impotence of school reform...

...This is a great, strange country...

...Even at El Salvador demonstrations on Main Street...

...Sancta simplicitas!—and entirely typical, in its murderous simplicity, of the thinking of those who look to politics for "salvation on Earth...

...If Holt does not offer any "new" reformist solutions as Egerton complains, it may be because Holt is not interested in reform...

...In headlong flight from Mom and Dad and all the ugly stupid realities of our ancestries, realities that include those unspeakable warty old lodge brothers in their double-knits, and middle-aged women who are frightened by the thought of an aborted child, and towheaded student-body presidents of Adventist academies, in that flight so full of horror, we risk leaving behind and out of account many of the people in whose names we ought to speak, and who now must resort to incantations and football cheers in order to feel part of any public dialogue at all...