No License for Rabkin
No License for Rabkin While generally favorable, Jeremy Rabkin's review of David Lowen-thal's No Liberty for License failed to grasp the heart of the book ("Licensing Liberty," March 9). By...
...Lowenthal has clearly seen into the depths of our depravity and has just as clearly exposed this to us...
...I did not have the honor of knowing him personally, but I felt that I came to know him via the television...
...But Lowenthal explains the ordering of his tri-partite book explicitly: "I should explain why the religious part of the First Amendment, which opens it, is made the third topic instead of the first here...
...Eva Sorock Wilmette, IL Sandy Hume It was with great sadness that I read the article by Christopher Caldwell on Sandy Hume (Casual, March 9...
...That we might recoil and consider any large-scale changes to be impossible says more about us than about the author...
...Though Rabkin accurately explicates the title of the book, he fails to address its subtitle: The Forgotten Logic of the First Amendment, a subject Lowenthal goes into in great depth...
...A more careful reading of the book would surely change this presumption...
...Local control of schools is an illusion in 1998 because the National Education Association is running the show, and because Americans with enough chutzpah to say no have become an endangered species...
...Now their jobs have been made much easier...
...Ruth B. Wilson Summerville, SC...
...Just imagine the public school of 2008, a warren of 100 or so fiber optically connected classrooms housing six laptop-wielding students, seated in a circle and thinking critically about federal control of the tobacco industry as the teacher-coach nods off behind the video equipment...
...This is because the harm done by constitutional misinterpretation regarding revolutionary groups and obscenity is even more extensive and urgently dangerous than the harm done in the area of religion...
...Not seeing this, Rabkin focuses instead on the issue of obscenity with the result that the author is presented more as a moralist motivated by indignation than as a scholar guided by reason...
...Working piecemeal toward certain limited ends may be justified in saner times...
...Like Caldwell I will greatly miss Sandy...
...surely it is to be considered that the authors of our present condition held no such scruples in moving us so quickly into the state in which we now find ourselves...
...even access to the mind-expanding magic of the Internet pales in importance when placed up against lowering class size...
...Perhaps now it is merely fiddling while Rome burns...
...Another consequence of Rabkin's false belief that obscenity is the core of Lowenthal's concerns is his reiteration of the phrase "Lowenthal demands . . ." This suggests that the author has presented more a jeremiad than a cogent analysis of the faulty logic at work in the Supreme Court...
...Seeing him on Fox and C-SPAN with his easy manner and quick smile, I felt like he was an old friend...
...is of central importance to the author because he placed it centrally in the book, and the gist of the review is skewed accordingly...
...Condemned by my election to the board of education to begin living morning to night with the idea of ever-more-shrinkable class sizes, I have come to the conclusion that history will award this century's first-place award for snake-oil sales to the teacher unions for brainwashing almost every parent into believing that public school quality is determined by how small classes are...
...That Lowenthal comes across as impolitic and unpolitical is due not solely to Rabkin's misreading of the book...
...For instance, Rabkin suggests that Part II ("Does the First Amendment Protect Obscenity...
...The order of topics in the book is dictated by the severity of the danger each presents to our country...
...He simply suggests that the states be free to exercise their rights in these matters without the heavy hand of the Supreme Court forcibly guiding all action...
...they just keep the one list: the number of times I suggest there might be something worth spending school taxes on besides lowering class sizes...
...Sadly, it's getting harder and harder to fight off the invasion of the federal government into our local public schools, and our battery-energized school boards have only themselves to thank for it...
...Actually, vigilant community members used to spend lots of time gathering a dossier of my extremist views on basic curriculum, traditional instruction, and teacher accountability (in case I ever thought seriously about going for a second term...
...James A. Nedved Framingham, MA No Class Too Small In "The Elixir of Class Size" (March 9), Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli have the problems of class size theoretically nailed down, but no one can really get inside the myth of class size like a local school-board member...
...Never mind inclusion, teacher style, curriculum, or even how many VCRs and PCs are in the classroom...
...By elevating those elements of it that are most shocking to contemporary sensibilities while neglecting the logic of the book, Rabkin ends up presenting the author as "an impolitic and unpolitical man...
...Lowenthal does not "want to ban...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 27
