On November 5, 1968, Republican Richard Nixon accomplished perhaps the greatest comeback in American political history, narrowly defeating his Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey, to become the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Only eight years earlier he had lost his first attempt at the presidency to John F. Kennedy in a devastating fashion. The election […]
Despite evidence to the contrary, we all use our brains. But most of us have never learned how to think effectively. I’m not talking about IQ or other measures of intelligence, which matter in their own way, of course. I’m talking about thinking as a learned skill. We don’t teach thinking in schools, and you […]
Imagine for a moment that you are the manager of a day-care center. You have a clearly stated policy that children are supposed to be picked up by 4 p.m. But very often parents are late. The result: at day’s end, you have some anxious children and at least one teacher who must wait around […]
My brother-in-law, Leonard Wolf, is a gentle and caring man by nature, a Chaucer scholar by training-and also an expert in the terror and horror genres in film and literature. Those interests brought him, some years ago, to consider writing a book about a real-life serial killer. The man had murdered ten people, including three […]
In the 1980s there was a proliferation of poverty collections, short stories, and novels published by women of Latin American descent in the United States. By the end of the decade, another genre of U.S. Latina writing, the autobiography, also came into prominence with the publication of three notable autobiographical collections: Loving in the War […]
As a child growing up in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) felt a strange and powerful connection to her father, Edward. Some of this naturally stemmed from their striking physical resemblance—the same large, piercing eyes, the same facial expressions. But more important to Mary, their whole way of thinking and feeling seemed completely in […]
On September 11, 2001, around 8:00 A.M., thousands of eager investment analysts, successful stockbrokers, bankers, traders, security guards, and secretaries made their way on the New York subway, on the city’s harbor ferries, and in its yellow cabs to southern Manhattan. The offices that awaited them filled 220 vast floors in the twin towers of […]
How well or poorly are teachers and schools teaching beyond the knowledge society? Recent patterns of educational reform in England and the United States begin to provide an answer. An appraisal of how England’s educational reforms fared under Tony Blair’s first period of Labor government found much to commend in its first wave of initiatives. […]
Teachers who teach beyond the knowledge society develop not only intellectual capital in their students but also social capital: the ability to form networks, forge relationships, and contribute to as well as draw on the human resources of the community and wider society. Francis Fukuyama defines social capital as “a set of informal values or […]
THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE Three centuries ago, in 1711, a business called the South Sea Company was established to assume 10 million pounds of Great Britain’s national debt, at 6 percent interest. In exchange, the company was granted a monopoly by the British government to trade in the South Seas. In these times preceding the […]