Barbara Lerner, in The Public Lag Behind Interest (Fall 1982), Subscription Dept.,
20th & Northampton Sts., Easton, Pa. 18042.
"If the quality of schooling could be assessed . . . resource allocation alone, America would lead the world," notes Lerner, an attorney and psychologist. In fact, U .S. students suffer an embarrassing education gap in comparison with students in other nations.
The United States spends more on education than any other country-7.7 percent of gross national...
yielded only one solid correlation with high achievement: larger homework assignments. (Another finding: The more parents help with homework, the lower their children's achievement.) And other studies show that homework levels, at least between 1960 and 1970, declined in the United States.
Lerner concludes that U.S. educators and parents do not demand enough of children. Since the advent of "open education" during the 1960s, she contends, standards for everything from school attendance...
Louisiana Slate University Press.
had successfully preserved the old order. In fact, says Heyrman, charity itself had been transformed from a natural obligation that bound society together to a token of "noblesse oblige" that widened the psychological gap between rich and poor.
"The Standardization of Time: ASetting the Sociohistorical Pers~ective" bv Eviatar World's Clocks Zerubavel, in American Journal of Sociol-
ogy (July 1982), P.O.Box 37005, Chicago,
111.60637.
The...
the West that they have set their clocks according to European time," declared, "It's a nightmare."
Yet, Zerubavel notes, such exceptions show that the way we organize time promotes interdependence and rationalism. The real nightmare would be a world fragmented different standards of time.
Defending "Welfare Dependency: Fact or ~yth" by
Richard D. Coe, in Challenge (Sept.-Oct. Welfare 1982), 80 Business Park Dr., Armonk, N.Y. 10504.
Rising federal social welfare outlays...
Stanley Rothman and S. Businessmen Robert Lichter, in The Public Interest (Fall 1982), Subscription Dept., 20th & North-
Little love is lost between America's top journalists and business execu- tives. This conflict should surprise no one, say Rothman and Lichter, political scientists at Smith College and George Washington University, respectively. Not only are the two groups at odds on social and political issues, but each views the other as the most powerful group in America.
The differences...
Georee Gerbner and Nancv Sienorielli. in Census ~merican Demographics (0ct.1982) P.O.
Box 68, Ithaca, N.Y. 14850.
Americans watch an average of over four hours of television daily, one-third of it during prime time. They see a world of adventure, melo- drama, and fantasy. Gerbner and Signorielli, of the University of Penn- sylvania's School of Communications, add that even the population of these shows is a poor reflection of reality.
In an analysis of some 14,000 characters appearing in 878...
men. Tele- vision women tended to be disproportionately young-one-third were in their twenties-and their marital status was left unclear in only 12 percent of the cases. Women also tended to age faster on television. More than 90 percent of the women over age 65 were portrayed as "elderly," the authors say, compared to 77 percent of over-65 males. While a majority of the real world's working women are married, on television they were not, and they were employed in traditional female jobs-nurses,...
devious means.
Such a change embodies risks, even if accompanied new safe- guards, Levinson concedes. But government must stop undermining "our individual privacy and ability to trust one another."
"Putting Cruelty First" by Judith N.Dilemma for Shklar, in Daedalus (Summer 1982), Liberals? American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1172 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, Mass. 02134.
While religious moralists condemn cruelty, they rank it well below such sins as the rejection of God...
armies in the name of God or a Machiavellian ruler-left Montaigne and Montesquieu with few solutions. Montaigne served briefly as mayor of Bordeaux and, Shklar says, "did as little as possible, a policy that he defended as the least harmful course."
Montesquieu, somewhat more hopeful, believed politics and morals could be kept separate. It was possible, he thought, to change social behavior through laws, as the English had done, without altering in- dividual morals. But even he joined...
the results. Many subjects agree: 84 percent of Milgram's former subjects had no regrets over the 1963 experiment. But critics such as psychologist Thomas Murray con- tend that, even if deception causes no obvious damage, it "does wrong to the person it deprives of free choice."
But deception's proponents, like Princeton's John M. Darley, claim that "psychologists have an ethical responsibility to do research about processes that are socially important . ..which means that sometimes...