WHAT CAN WE
LEARN FROM OTHERS?
by Val D.Rust
America is not the only country where teaching is not what it used to be.
In the once-homogeneous West German cities of Plettenberg and Altona, teachers must overcome barriers of language and culture much like those that complicate teaching in Florida, New York, and Texas. One of every three students in these two cities, and one out of five in Hamburg, are children of blue- collar "guestworkers"-from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Spain....
America's occasional, often alarmist reassessments of the public school system usually leave something constructive in their wake. Sometimes the benefits are concrete, such as the subsidies for science and language instruction under the Na- tional Defense Education Act of 1958. Sometimes they are psy- chological-merely a residue of healthy nationwide anxiety. There are already signs that the current wave of soul-searching will follow this pattern; that America is, once again, summoning the resolve...
BACKGROUND BOOKS
In 1776, a ship from Belfast docked in Baltimore and offered for sale "various Irish commodities, among which are schoolmasters, beef, pork, and potatoes." Such was the ignoble status of teachers in colonial America, notes Willard S. Elsbree, in The Amer- ican Teacher (American, 1939; Green- wood, 1970)) an account of the profes- sion's slow climb to respectability.
The Puritans, and later the Found- ing Fathers, held the idea of educa- tion in high regard. Nonetheless,...
Everything about totalitarianism, starting with the name, is problematic.
Whoever invented it, the name was put into currency by Be- nit0 Mussolini when he published an article in the Enciclopedia Italiana in 1932 in which he proclaimed himself a "totalitarian" and called the Italian Fascist state lo stato totalitario. That claim is widely taken by historians as more of a boast than a descrip- tion of Italian Fascist reality.
Beginning in the later 1930s, the name was picked up by...
. "For hundreds of years," wrote Graf Helmuth von Moltke in 1836, "the Danube has divided civilized and barbaric peoples, but today it brings them together." Plans for some sort of "Balkan Federation" were repeatedly proposed (and forgotten) during the 19th century. In the 1980s, cooperative ventures in the region center once more on the Danube.
The Wilson QuarterIylNew Year's 1984
118
Forbidding mountains. Gypsies. The Sarajevo assassination. Tito. Peasants dancing...
. "For hundreds of years," wrote Graf Helmuth von Moltke in 1836, "the Danube has divided civilized and barbaric peoples, but today it brings them together." Plans for some sort of "Balkan Federation" were repeatedly proposed (and forgotten) during the 19th century. In the 1980s, cooperative ventures in the region center once more on the Danube.
The Wilson QuarterIylNew Year's 1984
118
Forbidding mountains. Gypsies. The Sarajevo assassination. Tito. Peasants dancing...
"The countries with which this book deals-Yugoslavia, Romania, Bul- garia, Albania-are not major pow- ers; their resources are not of critical importance to the United States. American interests in the Balkan re- gion appear to be minimal.
"But all of us have seen half a dozen movies in which the idyllic peace and quiet of an early 20th- century American home are inter- rupted the announcement that in the Balkans an Austrian Archduke has been assassinated, an announce- ment to which...
public agencies and private institutions
"The USSR and Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s."
Praeger PublishersICenter for Strategic and International Studies, Box 465,
Hanover, Pa. 17331. 129 pp. $6.95 paper. Author: David E. Albright
During the late 1970s, the Soviet Union made substantial inroads in sub-Saharan Africa. The remainder of the 1980s, predicts Albright, who teaches at the U.S. Air War College, will bring solid but less spectacular Soviet advances.
Soviet activity in black A...
Sergio Bitar presented at a colloquium sponsored the Wilson Cen- ter's Latin American Program, July 13, 1983.
Between 1945 and 1960, the United States and its Latin American neigh- bors developed a tightly knit eco-nomic and security relationship that virtually closed the Western hemi- sphere to outsiders. That arrangement has crumbled, says Bitar, an expatri- ate Chilean businessman and govern- ment official, though the full effects have yet to be felt.
In 1960, Latin America's gross do- mestic...
"Why aren't we able to cope with the who had been thrown out of Stan-
grays?" mused a young research ford's anthropology department in
economist, sharing a sushi lunch at a February 1983.
restaurant near the Stanford cam- Mosher, according to a statement
pus. She had written her Ph.D. dis- issued by the university, was guilty
sertation on China's agriculture after of abusing his status as an anthropol-
a year of field work in the Chinese ogist and engaging in "illegal and...