Political Booknotes
Political Booknotes Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. Dinesh D’Souza. Free Press, $19.95. If you live in a cave and have missed the fuss about “political...
...In the rarified world of social policy, enfranchisement and employment are usually seen as fields apart...
...Students writing the best prCcis would read them aloud to their classmates...
...Would all these sons and in-laws risk their dollar salaries to obtain useful information or recruit an agent...
...Muxim Ktiiazkov Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning...
...You bet...
...Pantheon, $25.00...
...Up to now this agency has been almost universally portrayed as an omnipotent, unscrupulous, and highly effective intelligence service for which no task is too difficult...
...The natural course of events played into the hands of the KGB...
...If this Maisuradze and the one mentioned in the book are the same person, I feel sorry for the KGB...
...But as Soviets like myself understand, the KGB is not a separate island within Soviet society...
...There is, of course, no magical solution to the bitterness of divorce and the horror of child sexual abuse...
...It will be supervised by people who may rape us...
...I’m not convinced that all his proposals are practicalshifting troublesome kids from classroom to classroom, for examplebut I applaud his microcosmic approach to educational matters...
...I bet they wouldn’t, especially since they have highly placed relatives to protect them...
...the essence of teaching is moral action...
...he also has a section on how parents can directly and powerfully influence the quality of their children’s education...
...But the Afghani ruler was smart enough never to drink from only one glass or eat from one dish at a time...
...Now I know a lot...
...The vote is the fulfillment of the democratic promise of equality...
...D’Souza thinks the recent spate of racial incidents on progressive northem campuses is actually a backlash by white students against quotas...
...Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, appointed foreign minister of Iran in 1979, was an agent of the Soviet military intelligence service in his youth, having been recruited while studying in the United States...
...What Shklar gives us is not enough...
...Drawing on many conversations with teachers as well as extensive research, he concludes that the teacher can’t be separated from the taught, that teaching and learning are intertwined in complex ways-a notion that rarely occurs to outside advisers...
...Many students-and not only white onesmake an argument that group preferences are unjust, and many more who don’t want to speak publicly against them object in private...
...He insists that the central question about schools should not be “why doesn’t anything work...
...But 20 years in classrooms have convinced me that what it takes to make a good teacher also has a lot to do with mystery...
...The Classroom Crucible: What Really Works, What Doesn’t, and Why...
...This is partly true...
...school standards have been declining ever since...
...Colonel Mikhail Talybov...
...To grant the right to vote without providing anything meaningful to decide is to offer the trappings of equality without the substance...
...Jonathan Groner...
...I disagree...
...Reza Pahlavi was to be killed by the explosion of a powerful bomb hidden in a car parked on one of his usual routes...
...Groner notes that the court’s decision was “technically correct,” in that Elizabeth had to prove abuse had occurred to stop the visits, and if the evidence was evenly balanced, she had not met her burden of proof...
...in the failure of all too many office holders to meet minimal ethical standards...
...Knowing the material and having a passion to communicate it are critical to good teaching...
...The estranged (and soon divorced) couple began sparring over Hilary...
...and in an educational system bloated in administration, inadequate in teaching, and aimed at imparting vocational skills at the expense of civic literacy...
...If Hilary got justice, it was a fluke...
...It is an integral part...
...In D’Souza’s view, the common thread in the fights over the Western canon at Stanford, free expression at Michigan, race-based faculty hiring at Duke, and a number of other conflicts is what he calls the “victims’ revolution...
...Barzun bolsters this contention with a broad swipe at everything from computer spell checkers to sex education...
...Watch on the Right S * I I = Watch on the Right S w -Michael Novak -- -___I- -- - . -.I__ I _ _ I - -Icl - requires less evidence than the “preponderance” standard), the burden shifts to the accused to prove discrimination did not occur...
...My favorite part of the book is his “eyewitness account” of a seventhgrade history class...
...Susan Ohanian Hilary’s Trial...
...The contents of the dispatch made it clear that this agent was in fact the former Iranian foreign minister...
...Jacob Weisberg Inside the KGB: Myth and Reality...
...Talybov’s mission came to nothing...
...Vladimir Kuzic h kin...
...In his words, “A permissive society...
...Political Booknotes Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus...
...Yet Vladimir Kuzichkin’s book offers a glance at the KGB from quite an unusual angle...
...But some of that explanation is obviousin office-holders from the president on down who say one thing in campaigns and do another once in office...
...When Edward Abbey died last year, I knew I had lost a friend, someone who got closer to what I’m about as a teacher than any number of ivory tower sages...
...Each student could then write a prtcis...
...This task was assigned to KGB Lt...
...In American Citizenship, however, the object is to bring them together...
...employment is the minimum condition for the pursuit of individual happiness...
...Hilary’s story is bizarre and fascinating, but the enduring value of Hilary’s Trial is its dissection of the legal system...
...For years I lived under the misapprehension that the KGB was probably the only remaining Soviet institution that doesn’t do its hiring by nepotism...
...Like everybody else in Washington, I knew something about the custody dispute over Hilary Foretich before reading Hilary’s Trial...
...The KGB planted the parcel containing the cable in a way that the Iranian security service could easily discover it...
...Twenty years after my first long day as a teacher, I am convinced that the essence of teaching is not logic, not skill...
...Groner quotes one outraged reaction to this finding: “How would you like equipoise for your daughter...
...Dear mommy, can I go on a campout with the girl scouts...
...And that, Groner concludes, was the just result under the circumstances: When there is some evidence of sexual abuse but not enough to legally condemn the father, you nonetheless protect the child as much as possible by allowing only supervised visitations...
...This is a flaw that should be fixed to accommodate both the difficulties of proving child abuse and the possibility of unfounded accusations...
...Hilary was born a few months after Elizabeth Morgan and Eric Foretich were married and a few days after Elizabeth moved out of their house...
...in a set of public values that emphasizes individual self-seeking at the expense of the public good...
...I guess it’s not surprising that a man who dismisses all children’s books and magazines except Cricket as just “a step up from . . . comic books” would want 12-year-olds to read Prescott, but I wonder how many times he’s tried out this ideal lesson plan with real 12-year-olds...
...And them, in this case, means Jacques Barzun...
...in political parties that by conscious choice offer the public nothing of import to decide...
...University of Chicago Press, $24.95...
...It is hard to say no without offending them and making highly placed enemies...
...But Ghotbzadeh eventually grew disillusioned with communism and stopped all cooperation with the USSR...
...Shklar has produced a compelling argument that the right to vote and the right to a job, neither of which was written into the Constitution, are nevertheless necessary for full and equal American citizenship...
...after a brief stint at the foreign desk he went straight to our bureau in London, where he worked for several years before the British swept him away during one of their regular purges of the Soviet communitY...
...H~...I...
...In contrast, Pauly spends a lot of time talking about how schools might adjust individual classroom dynamics to better meet the specific needs of both teachers and children...
...in a mass media that treats the political enterprise with trivialization, disdain, and cynicism...
...It can never be limited...
...Ghotbzadeh was shot in September of 1982...
...The author, an alumnus of Dartmouth College and the Reagan White House, describes with clarity and fair-mindedness the recent disputes at six elite universities...
...The car drove on, oblivious...
...Sound messy...
...The court denied Elizabeth’s motion to stop an impending overnight visitation, finding that the evidence of past sexual abuse was “in equipoise...
...Although acknowledging that teaching presents “a set of difficulties,” Barzun insists “there is no mystery” to teaching...
...Ghotbzadeh fell out of grace with Ayatollah Khomeini and was arrested...
...And if the experts who would tell teachers what to do cannot figure out a way to test for the real qualities of teacherlinessfor humor, for depth of knowledge, for compassion, for tolerance, for ambiguity, for steel resolve-then I would invite them to shut up...
...Insisting that “the whole class should attend to the same thing,” Barzun would have seventh graders read Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico...
...What else...
...But the court also relied on the fact that the visits would effectively be supervised...
...But Eric got substantial visitation rights, which caused the subsequent knock-down, drag-out fight...
...For example, discrimination is also difficult to prove, so in many cases based on Title VII, the federal statute prohibiting employment discrimination, the burden of proof has evolved accordingly: The accusing party must present some evidence of discrimination, but once a prima facie case is made (which --cI_ - _ - pen...
...Only a miracle saved the life of the Iranian monarch...
...Marian K. Riedy American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion...
...A harder question too-one Barzun doesn’t try to answer...
...D’Souza makes a compelling case against affirmative action as it is practiced at American universities like Berkeley...
...So they probably prefer to clip newspapers, send Moscow phony reports, and collect their hard-currency paychecks...
...But D’Souza doesn’t muster any plausible evidence that students seething with resentment at the unfairness of affirmative action are the same ones burning crosses and daubing graffiti...
...Pauly puts a positive spin on the lack of predictability in the classroom: The Washington Monthly/April 1991 Pluralistic policies give every classroom a chance to succeed...
...Barzun carps that history is not well served by such varied activity as role-playing, smallgroup discussions, or trips to national monuments...
...Where he overreaches, in my opinion, is in blaming preferential treatment for causing bigotry...
...But they may not rape us...
...Too many blueribbon panels on excellence in the schools offer nothing more than a bagful of prescriptions, a sort of Lydia Pinkham general cure-all...
...Another court applying only the technically correct burden of proof would have to allow the alleged molester unsupervised access to the child...
...Indeed...
...Coincidence or not, about IO years ago a person named Valery Maisuradze came to the TASS news agency of the USSR, where I had worked for more than 13 years...
...but “why do some classrooms succeed while others in the same school don’t?’’ This is a profoundly different question...
...Had this operation succeeded, one wonders what course the events in Afghanistan might have taken...
...That’s why the KGB, as Kuzichkin points out, can count its recruited agents in any given country on the fingers of one hand...
...My opinion: Nothing can be further apart than this man and everything that is associated with the word “intelligence...
...Its residency in Teheran fabricated a false CIA cable to an unnamed American agent in Iran...
...When the Shah’s motorcade passed near the Volkswagen stuffed with explosives, the agent, obviously nervous, pressed the button on the remote control device but didn’t hold it long enough for the signal to go through...
...But the bigotry itself almost certainly has deeper roots...
...To Barzun, classroom teamwork is a “cowardly evasion...
...Because it promises lucrative careers overseas...
...In some cases, like that of David Duke, affirmative action becomes a pretext for expressions of racism...
...In some extreme cases, blind pursuit of “diversity” has caused administrators to adopt grotesquely disparate sets of admissions standards for different racial groups...
...Besides offering a window into the KGB culture, Kuzichkin provides these revelations: >Worried by the rapprochement between Teheran and Washington in 1961, the Kremlin ordered the KGB to assassinate the Shah...
...Busic, $22.95...
...In contrast, Edward Pauly is not so quick to dismiss the complexities of a teacher’s craft...
...A permissive society is a free society, the open society...
...For example, in August 1987 the court made a key decision that propelled Hilary into hiding and Elizabeth into jail...
...So even if this process started at the KGB only IO years ago, its intelligencegathering capacities should be significantly eroded by now...
...Which is to say that Shklar laments but does not explain the American rate of voter participation: Half of those eligible fail to vote in presidential elections, and two-thirds fail to vote in midterm elections, leaving the United States with the lowest rate of voter participation of any democracy in the world...
...To which this reviewer responds, “Necessary, but not sufficient...
...In Pauly’s words, “The value of a teacher’s experience is not contained in a bagful of techniques that can be applied in the same way in every classroom but in an understanding of the process of adjusting to each new group of students...
...The chances are about 50-50.’ Would you send your daughter on that camping trip with the equipoise...
...Being locked up in a room with 25 seventh graders and a stack of Conquest of Mexicos is as good a definition of hell as I’ve heard...
...in campaigns run on the basis of demagogic, generic 30-second messages...
...Giving some preference to students who have overcome economic disadvantage (but who are qualified enough to survive academically) would do much to foster real diversity, without the inequity and stigma that attach to discrimination based on race...
...Working in the kitchen as a cook, Talybov on several occasions added poison to Amin’s food and drinks...
...Nepotism is a very dangerous disease, capable of destroying any institution...
...Groner uses his facility with the law-he is a lawyer-to defuse some of the legal issues that the public found so explosive...
...To grant the right to a job without providing, for the overwhelming majority of job holders, meaningful self-fulfillment in either workplace or community is to provide the face rather than the reality of dignity...
...Curris B. Guns...
...Barzun supports his contention that child psychology and specific teaching methods are pretty much worthless by pointing out that millions of mothers without special training have taught their infants to read and write...
...Posing as an Afghani citizen, he was sent to Kabul and managed to infiltrate the staff of the presidential palace...
...Why did he prefer the First Directorate to staying in his native Georgia...
...Elizabeth got custody...
...There is certainly no lack of books about the KGB in the West...
...But we could at least fix some of the obvious trouble spots, such as the burden of proof...
...In 1979, before the Soviet invasion, the KGB tried to assassinate Afghani leader Hafizullah Amin, who had ousted and killed Afghanistan’s pro-Moscow president, Noor Mohammed Taraki...
...Any analysis, however succinct, that begins and ends with defining standings and citizenship in terms of the rights to the franchise and employment is simply inadequate in the face of increasingly oligopolistic power, great disparities of wealth, eroding institutions, lack of societal purpose, and a manipulative mass media that is, in Neil Postman’s words, “amusing ourselves to death...
...Only outside experts ever claim that teaching is a neat and tidy business...
...Intelligence work means dollars instead of worthless rubies...
...If you live in a cave and have missed the fuss about “political correctness” on campus, this book will bring you up to speed...
...D’Souza ends his book with several proposals for reform, the most promising of which is to replace racebased admissions with affirmative action based on financial need...
...I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess, and I hope we can keep it this way...
...Those grandsons and nephews want to protect their dollars and rubles regardless of their performance...
...Nevertheless, the KGB decided to hammer one more nail into his coffin...
...The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy...
...As it appears from Kuzichkin’s book, the KGB suffers as much from the incompetent intrusions of Communist party apparatchiks as any other institution in the Soviet Union...
...The Kremlin was so angry with him that it ordered the KGB to destroy him politically, and if possible, physically...
...Judith Shklar...
...In part, this is what lies behind the recent aggressive speeches by KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, who viciously attacked the reformist forces in the Soviet Union...
...His Begin Here is billed as a “practical, positive program for better schools,” but it amounts to a crotchety collection of short polemics that reveals nothing so much as how out-of-touch Barzun is with classroom realities...
...I feel the same way about classrooms...
...A radio-operated detonator had to be triggered by an unnamed illegal KGB agent who worked undercover in Iran...
...These policies usually don’t help their intended beneficiaries, since unqualified blacks and Hispanics are admitted even when there is little hope that they will be able to do the work demanded of them...
...Complaining that “during the last 50 years, nearly everything done in school has tended toward the discontinuous, the incoherent, the jiggly,” Barzun seems to be typical of so many of our governors, corporate executives, newspaper editors, secretaries of education, and everybody’s Aunt Mabel in insisting that his own graduation signaled the end of the golden age of education...
...Harvard University Press, $I 7.95...
...We were not friends, but I talked to him a couple of times and edited a lot of his news stories...
...Elizabeth went to great lengths to stop Eric from seeing Hilary, because she came to believe he was sexually abusing his daughter...
...Jacques Barzun...
...Therefore, all the ills of the society-corruption, patronage, overwhelming bureaucracy, and lack of initiative40 not spare the KGB...
...Let’s say she brings a note home from girl scouts...
...Once a relative of a high official is accepted to a lucrative position, say, at the KGB, there will be scores of other bureaucrats wanting the same favor...
...It can be fixed, too, by borrowing from another area of the law...
...D’Souza adduces some disturbing evidence in support of his thesis that misguided efforts to compensate for past injustice have contributed to a harsh climate of intolerance and intimidation...
...John Barron, Stanislav Levchenko, Oleg Gordievsky, and scores of other experts on Soviet espionage have contributed immensely to the understanding of what is going on in the huge building dominating Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow...
...Moreover, he developed an acute animosity toward the Soviets, which he showed amply during his tenure as foreign minister...
...Sinion & Schuster, $21.4.5...
...I applaud his recognition that you can’t talk about education in the school without talking about specific teachers and specific children in specific schools...
...in government that can respond to crisis very well (e.g., the San Francisco earthquake, Iraq) but anticipates crisis very badly (e.g., homelessness, air pollution, Iraq...
...For seven years, various courts dealt with the case...
...Kuzichkin’s book shattered that illusion...
...Edward Pauly...
...For example, he mentions the name of Valery Maisuradze, the son of the KGB deputy chief in Georgia, who surely made his way to the First Directorate with help from his father...
Vol. 23 • April 1991 • No. 4
