Americans than education. The two subjects have at least one thing in common~endur- ing controversy among the special- ists.
In Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (Oxford, 1979), David Nasaw sums up the current "radi- cal" critique of education: "Public schools are social institutions dedi- cated not to meeting the self-perceived needs of their students but to preserving social peace and pros- perity within the context of private property a...
Fred M.and Grace Hechinger
The history of American public school education is the re- peated triumph of hope over experience. Reform billed as new and revolutionary has often turned out to be an unconscious reprise of earlier innovations. Time and again after the early 1800s, novel ideas about teaching turned sour as their cham- pions insisted they had found "the one best way." We have aimed high and missed, adjusted our sights and missed again. We have never accepted the fact that there...
reduced oil imports. None of them "can supply much more energy than they do now," say the authors.
Because most domestic sources of oil and natural gas have already been tapped, the United States will be lucky to maintain production at today's level-the equivalent of 19 million barrels of oil daily. (Current daily con-sumption of oil and gas is up to 27.6 million barrels of oil equivalent.)
"The United States has enough coal," the report's authors say, "for at least the...
LECTIONS
What are the origin and nature of religion? The question has haunted the West for centuries. Religious dogma long supplied the answers, as Jewish and Christian theologians variously in- sisted that other religions were distortions of the original, pure, monotheistic faith. In the 18th century, rationalists, notably France's Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, proposed a new dogma: Mankind had originally placed its faith in reason; latter-day religions were the distortions. With the 19th...
SPECTIVES
The enduring popularity of Charles Dickens (1812-70) in the West is nowhere more evident than in America. All of his novels from Pick~~vick
Papers to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, are readily available in good bookstores, and there has been a recent surge of scholarly interest in England's muckraking novelist. Recently published have been a new biography, Dickens: A Life, by Nor- man and Jeanne MacKenzie; a revised paperback edition of Edgar Johnson's Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triuinph;...
Richard L. Lucier, in Public ~dminishation Review (July-Aug. 1979), 1225 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
The much-publicized citizens' "tax revolt" of 1978 didn't really hap- pen.
Proposition 13, the property tax relief measure passed Califor- nians in June 1978, was widely heralded by economists and politicians as the opening shot of a middle-class antigovernment, antitax move- ment. Indeed, proposals to limit taxes and/or government spending appeared on ballots in 13...