We like to think of ourselves as relatively peaceful and agreeable members of society. We are social animals to the core, and we need to convince ourselves that we are loyal to and cooperative with the communities we belong to. But on occasion, all of us have acted in ways that go against this self-opinion. […]

WHEN SOMEONE ASKED ME recently, “How are things?” I blurted out, “Everything’s good—for me anyway, if not the world.” If you are in the same boat, please don’t assume that it will remain afloat. And if you believe “Somebody ought to be doing something about this,” then please understand that this somebody had better be […]

IF AT THE END OF 2010, anyone had asked me where the next major Middle East crisis would most likely occur, I could have offered them a rich menu of possibilities. There was Iraq, of course, where despite progress, it often felt as if a return to chaos was just a market bombing or militia […]

A SOCIETY OUT OF BALANCE, with power concentrated in a privileged elite, can be ripe for revolution. The American colonies by 1776 were ripe for revolution, as was Russia in the early twentieth century. So are many countries today, including some called democratic. The trouble with revolution is that it usually replaces one form of […]

In late 1820, Mary Shelley (1797–1851), author of the novel Frankenstein, and her twenty-eight-year-old husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, moved to Pisa, Italy, after having spent several years traveling through the country. Mary had had a rough time of it lately. Her two young children had both died from fevers while in Italy. Mary […]

I BEGAN WRITING THIS BOOK shortly after the end of my presidency—after Michelle and I had boarded Air Force One for the last time and traveled west for a long-deferred break. The mood on the plane was bittersweet. Both of us were drained, physically and emotionally, not only by the labors of the previous eight […]

Scientific research is the application of the scientific approach to studying a problem. It is a way to acquire dependable and useful information. Its purpose is to discover answers to meaningful questions by applying scientific procedures. To be classified as scientific research, an investigation must involve the approach we described in the previous section. Although […]

Exclusive use of induction often resulted in the accumulation of isolated knowledge and information that made little contribution to the advancement of knowledge. Furthermore, people found that many problems could not be solved by induction alone. In the 19th century, scholars began to integrate the most important aspects of the inductive and deductive methods into […]

Educators are, by necessity, decision makers. Daily they face the task of deciding how to plan learning experiences, teach and guide students, organize a school system, and a myriad other matters. Unlike unskilled workers, who are told what to do and how to do it, professionals must plan for themselves. People assume that professionals have […]

As a young boy growing up in communist China, Gao Jianhua (b. 1952) dreamed of becoming a great writer. He loved literature, and his teachers commended him for his essays and poems. In 1964 he gained admittance to the Yizhen Middle School (YMS), not far from where his family lived. Located in the town of […]