"Christine borrows $850 for one year from the Friendly Finance Company. If she pays 12% simple interest on the loan, what will be the total amount that Christine repays?"
n the front lawn of Al-
exandria, Virginia's T.C.
Williams High School,
where I have been teach-
ing English for the past
20 years, there is a large sign from the U.S. Department of Educa- tion proclaiming us "one of the outstanding high schools in America." The sign has been there since 1984, when then-Secretary of Education Terrell Bell drove across the Potomac River to present us with one of the Reagan administration's first Excel- lence in Education awards.
Nine months earlier, B...
GRO BOOKS
or all the nation's earnest intentions and
policy gyrations during the last decade, the United States has barely budged out of its deep scholastic hole.
Just wait, the optimists say. Wait for stan- dardized tests to reflect reforms already in place. Or wait for new reforms. Or wait for Washington and the rest of the country to get really serious (i.e. to pile even more billions upon the billions already added to American education). To which remarkably few skeptics respon...
here are two images from my
youth that I shall never be
able to shake. There was that
clear Saturday afternoon in
October when I rode my bi-
cycle downtown to see a show at the Rialto, only to look up at the marquee and see the chilling announce- ment, "20 lanes of bowling." No movie I have ever seen has jolted me more.
The thousands of hours I spent in Allen- town, Pennsylvania's wondrous Rialto The- atre formed the core of my adolescent edu- cation. I learned "lessons" i...
The reunification of Germany has stirred old fears that were buried after the Nazi period. When historian Robert Darnton went to Berlin in 1989, he rediscovered layers of such anti-German fears within himself. He also discovered, as the Wall came down, a changed Germany. East Ger-mans, far from denying their Nazi and communist past, were eager to confront it. The more the Germans challenge their past, Darnton SUE-gests, the less anxious one can be about the German future.
by Robert Damton
always wishe...
Jencks, a prominent Northwestern so-ciologist, and Peterson, a Har- vard political scientist, attests.
The underclass is not really new, Jencks observes. The "lower-class" lives described in Elliott Liebow's 1967 book,
Tally's Comer: A Study of Ne- gro Streetcomer Men, for ex-ample, are "very similar. .. to the lives described in more re- cent writing on the under- class." But has this class of people been getting larger? Jencks's answer (contrary to news media reports) is...
E. DigBaltzell and Howard G.On the Bench Schneiderman, in Society (May-June 1991), Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
America's aristocrats, Tocqueville ob- served, are to be found not among the rich, but rather occupying "the judicial bench and bar." Insulated from popular pressures and appointed for life, the jus- tices of the Supreme Court appear to be the cream of that aristocracy. It seems only natural that they would be people of privileged origins, especially c...
upper-class presidents." Still, Americans of more modest origins
may be glad to know, one of the chief jus- tices ranked the authors as among the very greatest, Earl Warren, rose from quite humble beginnings. He was, it seems, a true aristocrat.
Liberalism at Bay "Race" by Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, in The
Atlantic (May 1991), 745 Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 02116.
The Democratic Party, which has lost five of the last six presidential elections, has a serious...
Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, in The New Yorker (May 6, 13, 20, Wise Men 1991), 20 West 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.
On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson stunned the nation announc- ing that he would not seek another term in the White House. The surprise came at the end of a speech in which he unveiled a limited halt to the bombing of North Viet- nam and proposed peace negotiations. Was his sacrifice made in an effort to end a war that-after prodding by the fabled Wise Men o...
W. R. Connor, in The American Why the Experts Scholar (Spring 1991), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C.
Were So Wrong 20009.
Despite prodigious intellectual labors (and prodigious sums spent to make them pos- sible), Western Sovietologists failed to foresee in any clear way the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and East- ern Europe. Where did the analysts go wrong? Connor, director of the National Humanities Center at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. savs that it was in
* .,
n...