THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief The Woorm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education by Peter Brime-low (HarperCollins, 320 pp., $24.95). Education these days,...
...As a history of conservatism, it's even better...
...Conservatism's emergence as a credible, intellectually vibrant movement rested on the epiphanies of unlikely people who realized that the mysteries of life would not be subsumed under theories that falter in their attempts to explain too much...
...Jonathan Leaf Getting It Right: A Novel by William F. Buckley Jr...
...Why, Brimelow asks, do we allow this scandal to persist...
...The protagonist, Woody Raynor, learns a hard lesson early in life when passion, treachery, Communist brutality, and a bullet to the hip leave him dedicated to rolling back the Red tide...
...Along the way, the two young protagonists, the lapsed Mormon and the renamed Jew, are drawn into National Review's circle principally by Marvin Liebman, another figure who lived outside both the old liberal establishment and its wacky opponents...
...Renaming herself Leonora Pound at Miss Rand's suggestion, the better to resemble the WASP heroes of Rand's novels, she meets Woody at Buckley's home, while helping found Young Americans for Freedom...
...He documents the billions of dollars unions have spent on campaigns against school choice and reform of requirements for starting teachers—and the billions the unions make from dubious insurance schemes for their members...
...In 1961 he finds a home in the John Birch Society working for the founder, Robert Welch, whose opposition to accommodation with communism morphed into a proclivity to see a Communist soul in nearly every anti-Communist conservative...
...As a novel, Getting It Right is fun...
...Leonora Goldstein, whose immigrant father died at the order of a Communist-controlled union, seeks temporal redemption at the side of Ayn Rand and her "Collective," the ironically named (at least ostensibly) group of disciples whose allegiance Rand required and received...
...Declining schools, he says, reflect sclerotic socialism compounded by out-of-control trade-unionism...
...Raynor, a Princeton graduate (and a Mormon who develops a taste for drink), discovers that Welch's society demands its followers abandon historical knowledge and doubts to embrace a conspiratorial vision that suspects everyone...
...Among other real-life conservatives to appear in the book are Stan Evans, Lee Edwards, Alfred Reg-nery, and the leadership of National Review...
...Education these days, someone once declared, is "casting false pearls before real swine...
...He reveals the ways in which union clout compels useless staffing...
...He cites, for instance, repeated occasions on which teachers' unions have taken over the school boards responsible for negotiating their contracts...
...In The Worm in the Apple, journalist Peter Brimelow makes the case that teachers' unions have hijacked our education system and, increasingly, our legislative organs as well...
...Regnery, 311 pp., $24.95).The quest for a coherent conservative worldview— and a politically appealing wrapper to put it in—has a long and colorful history over the last fifty years, and that's the subject of Getting It Right, Buckley's latest novel...
...Brimelow is a punchy writer with a compelling, natural voice...
...And at reminding us that human life doesn't require a "system," Buckley's writing is at its best...
...A nation's fate derives at least as much from its schools as from its armies...
...Winfield Myers...
...Brimelow acknowledges that some public schools still function with competence—but that achievement is sporadic and realized only through ever rising spending...
...Why are contemporary students so poor...
...His argument in The Worm in the Apple isn't novel, but the weight of new and damning examples makes the book important...
...He shows the virtual impossibility of firing incompetent, lazy, and recalcitrant teachers...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 27
