Political Booknotes
McCarthy, Dante Ramos,John Marks,Tom Wicker,Barbara Boyle Torrey,Colman
Political Booknotes Just the Facts? By Dante Ramos F.D. HIRSCH JR., WAS BRIEFLY famous in 1987, but mostly due to bad timing. In his book Cultural Literacy, the University of...
...It also means that learning can’t be painless...
...Political Booknotes Just the Facts...
...Of the two, Daniel is better known: a poet and playwright...
...It abounds with grays...
...But he does believe that knowing certain facts is vital to substantive learning...
...mandate that the federal government evaluate the state programs The real test will not be whether the feds can give good news to Congress and the states on their reforms...
...She is torn between the extremes of the issue: She feels that abortion is wrong but believes that the state should not interfere with a woman’s right to control her body...
...The blowout of potential information on the information superhighway is an indication of the implausibility of a factoid-based approach to curriculum,” one educator declared in a telling letter to The Washington Post...
...In other words, for all the illusory successes of the civil rights movement, and despite the deluded or willful belief of so many whites, including Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, that the movement resulted in a color-blind society, the nation remains a house divided-or, as other writers have put it, two nations, separate and unequal...
...Ordained in 19S2 bv Richard Cardinal Cushing, the new Father Berrigan found himself on a brief assignment in Europe, including a military chaplaincy in West Geriiiany...
...This belief is variously called “progressive,” “modern,” or “childcentered,” and Hirsch cleverly traces its origins to a strain of naturalistic individualism that grew out of the Romantic movement and still pervades American culture...
...Wake Up and Smell the Anger By Tom Wicker CARL ROWAN HAS GIVEN THE Coming Race War in America the subtitle: "A Wake-Up Call...
...No funder was willing to support the agency which had arranged for about 150 successful adoptions...
...In early 1925, before the advent of progressive curricula, lowincome black soldiers from states with good educational systems scored higher on standardized tests than white soldiers from states with bad schools...
...For most people, abortion is not an absolute, black-or-white issue...
...One way to decide which ones to read is to look in their indexes...
...She calls for repeal of all abortion laws and states, “Competing ideologies should be fighting to make their world views intelligible and attractive to others, not fighting in the courtrooms over the legal status of abortion...
...Since WWII the U.S...
...And if the popular notion is that children learn what they need to know when they’re good and ready to know it, the idea that children shouldn’t be burdened with abstract facts becomes comprehensible...
...Our convictions are splintered, our loyalties divided...
...It may be understandable why those directly involved in the abortion struggle would not want to divert resources to promote adoption, but what about the rest of us...
...If it alerts an either blind or uncaring America to its disastrous race relations-or, worse, if it fails to do so-a little overstatement will hardly matter...
...In fact, vither much liked this cooperative arrangement...
...But when the feds can’t even evaluate themselves, they are hardly credible evaluators for others...
...One would have thought that, irrespective of their differences, both sides could agree this was a good thing...
...An important federal role should be to provide impartial evaluation of state and local experiments and then to disseminate the results...
...Rowan puts it graphically: ‘While some blacks found dignity and political clout and economic opportunity over the last thirty years, the great mass of black Americans have not...
...And the question of why the wealthiest country in history is not making more progress drives this book...
...Our ambivalence signifies the fact that we live in contradictory worlds...
...Many education writers and researchers would hardly be bothered by the suggestion that schools don’t teach facts anymore...
...each side claims a zero-sum game, an either/or structure...
...As someone who works in the field of conflict resolution, 1 see no possibility of negotiating a settlement on the basic issue of abortion as long as the pro-life side sees abortion as murder and the pro-choice side believes that women have a fundamental right to choose...
...spends more than most countries on education and more than all on health care, yet our systems generate greater resentment, are slow and more expensive, and produce no better results than those in Europe...
...a teacher taking stints in classrooms from Colorado College to Loyola University in New Orleans...
...Demonization is not possible if the adversary is credible and reasonable...
...Similarly, poverty in the United States has actually decreased significantly since the 1960s...
...This assertion is surely an oversimplification, but it packs considerable explanatory power: In France, where even preschools are subiect to a fact-based national core curriculum, the learning gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students, including immigrant children from North Africa, narrows with every school year...
...Unfortunately, many of society’s needs cannot be solved by individuals alone...
...They continue "to act with a disciplined nonviolenceeven though they are bound to exchange a sizable chunk of their freedom for deeds leaving little discernible trace on the institutions they would subvert...
...COLMAN McCARTHY is the director of the Center for Teaching Peace, and a volunteer high school teacher...
...We don’t take advantage of the natural experiments our federal system generates when states take the initiatives to experiment with new programs...
...The authors are seasoned journalists who interviewed broadly for the book, are sensitive to spiritual nuances usually lost on the secular media, and who artfully tell the stories of two of this century’s most ardent keepers of the faith and sharers of the peace...
...if a pregnant woman came to Reproductive Health Services and expressed a desire during counseling to give birth and put her baby up for adoption, Adoption Associates was likely to refer her to Our Lady’s Inn, a Catholic home for unwed mothers...
...Unfortunately, as Kathy Rudy writes in her thoughtful new book, “In the logic of today’s debate, there is no room for third or fourth alternatives...
...That’s why his next book will be on governance...
...A major testimony of faith was one’s jail record...
...But depth, breadth and accuracy of knowledge are the very things that our K-12 system tends to disparage as belonging to the ‘banking theory of schooling...
...One telling anecdote is related by John Dear, a young Jesuit in the Berrigan mold who was recently imprisoned in North Carolina with Phil Berrigan for damaging a fighter plane...
...But many media commentators ignored the argument and merely compiled cutesy, stump -you quizzes from Cultukal Literacy’s appendix, a list of important names and terms Hirsch believes all Americans should be able to identify...
...JOHN MARKSis president of Search for Common Ground, a Washington non-profit group, one of whose projects is to promote dialogue and joint action around the abortion issue...
...place great value on depth, breadth and accuracy of knowledge, as well as on independence of thought,” he writes...
...Well, hell, as he might say in this colloquially written book, there's plenty for the nation to be awakened to...
...Anyway, Rowan is on target most of the time...
...But formal education is an inherently artificial process, and the introduction of naturalistic methods may not improve it...
...Progressive theorists believe classroom education should be as lifelike and natural as possible...
...The authors think not: "Above all else, conscience and protest did count, and millions of others opposed to the pointless and bloody (Vietnam) war were right...
...courts have strengthened the commitment to individual freedoms over commitment to community...
...He had been sent to Georgetown University, the Jesuit school that has happily provided professorial roosts to Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Henry Kissinger, and Madeleine Albright-advocates all of violence via U.S...
...Students in an honors geometry class I happened to visit at a well-respected Louisiana public high school spent an hour photographing examples of geometric figures around the school yard...
...Bok concludes that the state of the nation is more complicated, but less bleak, than people assume...
...He examines in detail crime, race, education, children, the environment, the arts, health, poverty, and old age...
...In his new book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, he again asserts that general factual knowledge is a vital part of learning...
...Consider the case of Reproductive Health Services, a St...
...it will be whether they can give bad news...
...This caution increases his credibility for the conclusions he does feel confident in malung...
...In race relations we’ve made more progress than is generally believed, but the easy gains may have already been made...
...Stay tuned...
...Reframing the issue does not solve the core dispute, but it might help reduce the approximately 1.5 million abortions performed each year in the United States-an outcome that everyone should be able to support...
...Hirsch’s ideas deserve better treatment...
...As a result, in 1993, Reproductive Health Services felt compelled to close Adoption Associates for lack of money...
...Discovery learning, for example, is a pleasant but inefficient way to teach traditional academic subjects...
...In The State of the Nation, Bok has taken on a formidable task...
...The same spirit of defiance led to felony convictions and imprisonment, on charges ranging from raiding draft board files to damaging weaponry...
...Still, compensations for these omissions abound...
...Religious Disobedience by Colman Mccarthy In the early church, followers of Rabbi Christ the lawbreaker were known not as christians-originally a term of derision first used in 70 A.D.-but as rebels who practiced nonviolence and the compassionate communism of sharing wealth according to need...
...A good place to start would be for pro-life and pro-choice advocates to rehumanize the faces behind the stereotypes and to come together for dialogue...
...a writer of rich, metaphorical prose...
...Assuming that students don’t learn facts in school, Hirsch suggests that wealthier students’ main advantage is that they learn more facts at home than poorer students do...
...But he’s right to sound an alarm about the excesses of educational progressivism...
...Students don’t need to be drilled in isolated facts...
...Instead of-or in addition to-pro-choice and pro-life supporters confronting each other on the legality of abortion, let them come together around rameworks that both can support...
...The authors provide an 18-page bibliography which includes the 31 books by Daniel Berrigan and the eight by Philip...
...For a reminder that the standards of the early church have not entirely vanished, Murray Polner and Jim O’Grady offer Daniel and Philip Berrigan...
...He cites the Mayan Indian Zapatism of the Chiapas state in Mexico for precedent-a weak people but one who "wouldn't take it any more...
...He ably defends affirmative action (“Ninety-six percent of all the scholarship money in America goes to whites”), refutes those who believe welfare recipients are merely lazy, derides the argument that ending welfare will stop out-of-wedlock pregnancies, demolishes claims that blacks are genetically inferior, and persuasively attributes much of black crime (while admitting there's a lot of it) to poverty, homelessness, and a lack of jobs...
...These days, Christians are still being arrested or jailed, but for different reasons: preachers for money fraud, anti-abortionists for killing doctors, and a Catholic bishop in Minnesota for drunk driving...
...Philip, who has spent a total of 15 years in prison for violating unjust laws that sanction killing, lives in Baltimore with his wife...
...Pro-choicers Against Adoption...
...Had there been no demonstrations, no draft board raids, no campus upheavals, no alternative weeklies, no centrist opposition, and yes, no Dan or Phil Berrigan and the Catholic Left, there is no telling when it might have ended, how many more Asians and Americans would have died, and even whether nuclear weapons might have been used: Polner and OGrady are thorough but not exhaustive biographers...
...BARBARA BOYLE TORREY is executive director of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Science and Education at the National Research Council...
...pro-lifers and pro-choicers mirrored each other when they said, in effect, that working together on adoption makes the other side look reasonable...
...He also predicts that the lack of adequate gun control laws will result in extreme violence...
...And if that’s not enough, he then compares the US...
...It also included an adoption agency, called adoption Associates, that worked closely with area pro-life supporters...
...Philip Berrigan, a former World War 11 soldier, joincd the Josephites in 1950 after graduating from the College of the Holy Cross...
...At a time when most people seem frustrated with the polarities of the abortion debate, such dialogue might well produce fresh ways to thmk about and to act on questions of concern to women and children...
...A tradition only wins in the abortion debate when a woman with an unwanted pregnancy sees the hope and possibilities offered to her by that tradition and changes her interpretation of her pregnancy as a result...
...If an index refers to Derek Bok extensively, read the book...
...Ironically, when the government does become more proactive, it does not systematically evaluate its own programs...
...Rowan believes that the discriminatory attitudes of many whites, together with the more lethal plans of supremacist groups hoping “to take back America,” will bring on a race war in which “black involvement...
...She writes: We believe one thing, and at the same time we believe something completely contradictory...
...and a priest, steadfast in the spiritual service he began as an 18year-old seminarian in 1939...
...The evidence he amasses to describe the underlying tectonics of American society comes from a wealth of research and statistics...
...if it doesn’t, pass...
...By John Marks ABORTION HAS BECOME A NOholds-barred battle between unyielding foes...
...If you, like me, despite this mi de coeur, are not convinced of the likelihood of a race war, here’s another Rowan prediction that may make you think twice: “If present trends continue, an absolute majority of black males aged 18 to 40 will be in prison and camps by the year 2010”-I4 years from now...
...Sometimes even the best teachers can fall victim to misbegotten theories...
...Even if you don’t believe there’s a realistic threat of armed racial conflict, you’d better believe there is a high probability of economic and social decline that will blight the nation’s future far more surely than the federal deficit over which so many crocodile tears are shed...
...Hirsch rightly sees this excuse for what it is: a condescending presumption that poor and/or minority children can never be expected to learn as much as soccer-playing white kids from the suburbs...
...Students have to be challenged to articulate the questions that need attention in the solution of problems...
...Unfortunately, Hirsch is a bit overzealous...
...Unfortunately, the repetition that educational progressives deride as “drill and kill” is key to mastering most vital skills, including reading, composition, and mathematical computation...
...trends are common to all advanced economies, such as the slowing of productivity growth, and suggest what trends may be unique to our own particular culture, such as the dramatic increase in violent crimes...
...Potential givers interested in the abortion issue usually support one side or the other...
...To Hirsch, the contrast between the worldwide renown of American universities and the depressing (but now familiar) performance of American elementary- and secondary-school students in international comparisons proves the superiority of traditional education...
...As in all wars, propaganda merges with reality, and demonization of the enemy substitutes for communication...
...DANTE RAMOS is a reporter at The TimesPicayune in New Orleans...
...She says that pro-choice partisans “need to be working toward ways that break down the racial, class, and heterosexist barriers that exist between women in order to move into a world where women have a greater number of options than pregnancy or abortion...
...Rudy believes that for pro-life Christians, the most appropriate way to deal with abortion is to provide more effective assistance to women with unwanted pregnancies-which would logically reduce the demand for abortion...
...That lack, not welfare, he points out, is “how and why black people have become the heart of America’s permanent underclass...
...The authors offer nothing on the debate over nonviolence vs...
...and that Latinos, after realizing “the paranoiacs who spew forth rhetoric about killing to save the white race have no more respect for brown people than they do for black people,” ultimately will fight beside blacks...
...Why then isn’t the best social science research leading to the best social policies among industrial countries...
...TOM WICKER is a former columnist for The New York Times and the author of Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America...
...The international comparisons show what part of US...
...Of course, progressives dispute the value of standardized tests, possibly because the results are often discouraging...
...Our Lady’s Inn, whose staff and directors were fervently pro-life, provided advice, pre-natal support, and residential care...
...In systematic studies of instructional methods, children in progressive classrooms couldn’t read or do math as well as children whose teachers taught facts and required considerable repetition and practice, and usually addressed the entire class at once...
...Another issue that Bok‘s analysis implicitly raises, but does not explicitly address, is why, when our social science research is as good or better than any in the world, our social policies are so dyslexic...
...Rudy’s specific solutions probably too closely reflect radical feminist thinking to be of universal appeal...
...He roiled the waters by applying the teachings of the gospels to the lives of the poor he was serving...
...Imprisonment was often the price for trying to recruit others to the creed...
...If you run your society,” Rowan asserts irrefutably, “in a way that leaves millions of men and women poorly educated and untrained for work, and millions more denied decent jobs because of racial and sexual discrimination, then you are going to have millions of people living in poverty” Rowan insists, moreover, that in such a society there will be-and is, in the United States-“a direct correlation between a community’s rate of violent crimes and its levels of racism-reflected in poverty, dearth of jobs and good schools, level of family breakdown, drug trafficking, sexual exposure and abuse, and general hopelessness and despair...
...We, therefore, rarely learn from either our successes or failures...
...But while rapid changes and increasing diversity help explain why we face complex social challenges, they are no excuse for chronic underachievement...
...Even in an impassioned introduction, where he writes that a race war can be averted “only if we stop denying that a grave threat exists,” his point is powerfully taken...
...And government poverty programs have been a poor substitute for two-parent families...
...He is quick to point out when the research is equivocal and the data inadequate...
...Our colleges and universities...
...But while the assignment probably did’force students to “think critically” about the relationship between geometry and nature, they might have thought much harder by learning in the hoary old way: working through proofs of complex geometrical theorems...
...Rudy presents her own framework for transcending the bifurcated debate...
...Louis, America might even wind up with both more life and more choice...
...His survey ranges from the economy to quality of life to opportunities to values...
...history in the 20th century...
...government supports scientific research at similar levels as other industrial countries...
...Bok ultimately concludes that our successes as a society are in areas in which we depend on individual rather than government initiative, such as scientific research at universities and private enterprise...
...As was the case when prochoice and pro-life supporters cooperated to promote adoption in St...
...Like Martin Luther King Jr., he tied together the excesses of the U.S...
...Up through the early O OS, he taught in high school and college, sending students into Catholic working houses of hospitality in hopes of radicalizing them to side with the ideals of nonviolence and with the poor, as hc himself one day would...
...Bok‘s analysis shows that the United States has been making more progress than many people realize...
...And what does it matter that I believe the apocalyptic prediction of his book is somewhat overwrought...
...After all, from the prochoice point of view, women faced with unwanted pregnancies were given another option to choose...
...And those improvements cannot be done well without efficient government policies...
...Both brothers were directed by superiors in their orders to shut up when tempted to speak out on war and racism...
...Frequently, other progressive innovations follow, including “hands-on” discovery learning, descriptive report cards without letter grades, the abandonment of “whole-class’’ instruction, and the postponement of certain mathematics topics until “developmentally appropriate” ages...
...It was easy to perceive him less as a would-be education reformer than as an apologist for the 1980s trivia-game fad...
...The lack of familial commitment has helped swell the welfare rolls with fatherless children...
...For confirmation, choose any statisticthat black unemployment consistently runs at twice the level of white joblessness, that the median net worth of black households is $4,604 compared to $44308 for white households...
...Yet until 1993, Reproductive Health Services was not only an abortion provider...
...Certainly Hirsch is making a bold claim: that most education researchers are simply wrong about how childredn learn, just as Marxists were simply wrong about the way economies work...
...The future resister of Caesar’s wars heartily embraced the cassocked military regime of Rome’s chosen, the Jesuits...
...But the last thing I need is another Dan Berrigan at Georgetown...
...An assistant professor of ethics and women’s studies at Duke University, Rudy was raised Catholic and left the Church over “political quarrels...
...One by one, Rowan takes on these myths...
...As a Josephite priest in an order founded as a “Negro apostolate,” Berrigan was sent into black parishes in Washington, Baltimore, and New Orleans...
...Nevertheless, she is completely on target with her central idea of the need to transcend the current deadlock...
...Americans cannot afford to deny that threat...
...He is the epitome of the American Jesuit...
...By Dante Ramos F.D...
...And in this area, we have no easy models that can be applied from other countries...
...To Hirsch, the success of such bestsellers as The Hurried Child proves that Americans are suspicious of artificial interference with the natural development of children...
...For instance, the US...
...In his book Cultural Literacy, the University of Virginia professor of English argued that most American adults have too little factual knowledge about history, literature, science, and other fields to sustain an intelligent national discourse...
...war machine to the deprivations inflicted on the destitute at home...
...In The Schools We Need, he often writes as if American schools have taught no factual content whatsoever since mid-century...
...And they dismiss international comparisons that ought to alarm them by pointing to America’s considerable cultural diversity and social problems...
...This is not Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King Jr., nor David Garrow on Lyndon Johnson...
...In the 2lst century, the United States is going to have a population with no ethnic group in the majority...
...Most contemporary education researchers believe rigid content requirements effectively require the stupefying repetition of often irrelevant data, impede children’s acquisition of cognitive skills, and prevent teachers from catering to individual students’ strengths and needs...
...And although the poor in the United States have less income than in other countries, they are not necessarily consuming less, and therefore may not be more deprived...
...whlte racism, whether expressed as discrimination or indifference, in Rowan’s view, is the primary cause of such disgraceful differences, and has made possible the unthinkable-a race war...
...My own view is that many, if not most, Americans share her ambivalence...
...U.S...
...Why not, for example, work together to prevent unintended pregnancies...
...is still the most productive country in the world, but we require improvements in education, training, and investinvestment to continue making progress...
...That’s a drop from the ratio of $64 to $100 in the Great Society era...
...Even if their revolt can't win, they have made it clear "that life in Mexico (can) never be the same...
...will largely be reactive...
...Too few whites, however, see, or will admit, that chain of cause and effect...
...The last seems to me one of a handful of questionable contentions in what is admittedly a polemic-a “wake-up call” that is more nearly a cry of anger and anguish than a summons to arms...
...He is, however, not at the mercy of their inadequacies...
...But this has come at the same time as increasing government assumption of social responsibility for vulnerable populations and a perceived decline in personal responsibility, especially within the family...
...from the pro-life point of view, each baby born and adopted was a life saved...
...A collaborative adoption program clouded the issue...
...military death-dealing...
...Dear recalls: “I talked to the Georgetown rector about doing civil disobedience and he said, ‘I know that Dan Berrigan will be the only Jesuit remembered in US...
...The US...
...Bok knows the weaknesses of both, and sifts the evidence for his conclusions...
...they need the intellectual space to develop skills for asking pertinent questions and for knowing where and how to find the needed data...
...Yet for decades, progressive-minded education professors have urged teachers in grades K-12 to eschew facts-say, the roles of the major figures in the French Revolution-in favor of critical-thinking skills, even though considerable psychological research and the performance of American students in international comparisons suggest that this approach is ineffective...
...Amen to that...
...And not much is here on the brothers’ work in classrooms, though both were teachers who instructed kids to skip writing obtuse papers on theology and go find God in the lives of poor people...
...Just as good teachers in traditional schools have always leavened their lectures with visual aids and occasional hands-on projects, the good teachers in progressive schools recognize that students need a generous helping of factual knowledge to learn...
...violence between Dan Berrigan and Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua...
...For instance, educational achievement in the United States is not as bad as people say, and is actually improving-but not as fast as in other countries...
...Yet education scholars who advocate research-based methods often seem to operate in a universe bounded by the work of other education scholars and impervious to the findings of psychology and neurobiology...
...And he doesn’t consider such factors as the length of the academic year and the low salary of teachers relative to other professions as explanations for American schools’ poor performance...
...Was it all futile...
...What slowly emerges from the tapestry of data and research that Bok weaves is a wealthy nation that is underachieving...
...From the opposing perspectives of abortion supporters and foes, Reproductive Health Services was viewed as either a place of refuge or a killing field...
...One reason is that no other industrial country has a society as complex as the United States...
...government becomes more proactive, Bok notes, it does less well than in other countries...
...People associated with both Adoption Associates and Our Lady's Inn were accused of the same transgression: consorting with the enemy...
...He has surveyed the major social changes in the United States since World War I1 and examined not only the causes of each trend, but also the pattern of the combined changes...
...But his analysis is fascinating, and his conclusions are often compelling...
...Nevertheless, the new welfare reform provisions...
...Bok’s analysis of science and technology points out that the US...
...Adoption Associates arranged placement with a family...
...When Reproductive Health Services sought outside funding for Adoption Associates, every donor approached refused...
...social trends to those in other industrial countries...
...Daniel is currently part of a Jesuit community in Manhattan...
...If you or I were facing that prospect, we’d fight too...
...The country is growing at twice the rate of most developed nations, we have considerably more immigration than other countries, and we are becoming more di’v erse more rapidly...
...There does, however, seem to be a way to drain poison from the issue and, in the process, improve the quality of our national discourse...
...Don’t do it...
...Ultimately, the ubiquitous (but ill-defined) critical thinking that elementary and secondary educators so value is only possible when students know enough facts-and therefore have enough points of referenceabout the world to make reasonable inferences and conclusions, Hirsch believes...
...Applying formal skills to looked-up data is a poor substitute for critical thinking about subject matter that a student knows well...
...The brothers, conclude Polner . and O’Grady, “honored the country and the world in this, the bloodiest century in human history, by their moral balance, in public and private...
...But when the US...
...Louis abortion provider that became a national symbol after the 1989 Supreme Court case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services...
...We have had a failure of imagination about how to support the deserving poor kids without supporting their undeserving parents...
...But the United States has more scientists, including social scientists and engineers, in the labor force than any other country except Japan...
...Constantly to create a lifelike, ‘meaningful context’ is not the principle that is followed in teaching young children ballet, or piano playing, or downfield blocking, where some admixture of specialized drill and practice is thought to be essential,” Hirsch writes...
...Hirsch’s suggestion that a classical liberal education furthers the modern liberal’s pursuit of equity and the conservative’s pursuit of efficiency is the knockout punch of his book...
...He also believes this factual knowledge should be enshrined in specific nationwide educational standards...
...He declares, “The real-life competencies that people need, such as the abilities to read, to write, to communicate, to learn, to analyze, and to grasp and manipulate mathematical symbols, have major components that psychologists have found to be ‘domain-specific.’ This means that an ability to think critically about chess does not translate into an ability to think critically about sailing...
...Social Policy: underachieving and Dyslexic By Barbara Boyle Torrey WE ARE GOING TO BE SWAMPED with books at the millennium about the future of the United States...
...There’s a limit, he argues, “to how much oppression black Americans will take,” regardless of how much firepow er would be arrayed against the armed rebellion...
...or that, as Rowan writes, “the famnormal black family has $57 for every $100 available to the normal white family...
...They point instead to blacks’ supposed genetic inferiority, laziness deficient values, sexual promiscuity criminal tendencies, or all of the above...
...Progress, however, has noticeably slowed in the last two decades, and compared with other countries, we are not making enough improvement...
...Daniel, now 75, and Philip, 73, are described as leaders of the "Catholic Resistance," a band of dissenters from conventional state and church pieties...
...Instead, they spoke louderand not only with words...
...Hirsch is not claiming that the ability to recite obscure dates or definitions should be the goal of education...
Vol. 29 • March 1997 • No. 3
