Response to "March of the Pessimists"
by Richard Rothstein, August 30, 2006
Chester Finn, in his August 17 "Gadfly" posting ("March of the Pessimists"), responding to a New York Times article by Diana Jean Schemo (here) and a Wall Street Journal essay by Charles Murray, expresses puzzlement that "the likes of Schemo and Murray" can't see that good schools can overcome the disadvantages of poverty, racism, troubled families, crime-infested neighborhoods, and harmful peer influences.
These are complex issues, not elucidated by labeling these writers, as Mr. Finn does, 'liberal,' 'conservative,' 'pessimist,' or 'defeatist.' But I take Mr. Finn at his word that he genuinely does not understand why Schemo, Murray and others do not share his belief in the power of good schools to offset all other social and economic influences. I will attempt, as respectfully as I can, to explain why, for my part, I do not share his belief.
In short, given that, as Mr. Finn asserts, children's time influenced by families and communities exceeds the time they are influenced by schools "by a multiple of four or five," I am puzzled that he fails to agree that serious and successful efforts to substantially narrow the achievement gap must include social and economic policies to improve the circumstances of family and community life, as well as policies to improve the quality of schooling.
First, let's clarify some common imprecisions in the discussion. Mr. Finn asserts that good schools are "powerful enough instruments to boost poor kids' achievement to an appreciably higher academic plane." Nobody - not I, nor anyone with whom I am familiar - disagrees with this assertion. But what is commonly argued (and the notion that I dispute) is not that good schools can boost the achievement of disadvantaged children to "an appreciably higher plane" but rather that such schools can "close the achievement gap;" i.e., produce achievement from lower class children that is approximately equal to the achievement of middle class children. More specifically, the claim is that if all disadvantaged children could attend such schools, their average achievement would not be appreciably different from the average achievement of middle class children – they would be as likely to attend good colleges, be no more likely to end up in prison or as teen parents, be as qualified for good-paying jobs, etc. Another way of thinking about the claim that good schools can "close the achievement gap" is that if all disadvantaged children attended good schools, and graduated, on average, with average middle class levels of achievement, the vast social inequalities that now pervade American society would disappear. Or, as New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg put it, if his New York City school reform program succeeded, "a lot of what Dr. [Martin Luther] King wanted to accomplish in our society will take care of itself."
A puzzling aspect of Mr. Finn's confidence that good schools can overcome all or most of the negative influences of deprived social and economic environments is that he himself, in other contexts, wisely endorses "value-added" as a preferred way to evaluate school quality, and as the appropriate way to compare average school-type (charter/non-charter, private/public) performance. Examining value-added trends makes sense only if you understand that social class greatly influences the level of student achievement. Granting that, on average, disadvantaged children (for example, those living in poverty) cannot reasonably be expected to achieve at the same level as middle class children (also, on average), a school serving disadvantaged children can be considered successful if it raises their achievement to levels significantly higher than it was previously, even if these higher levels remain, on average, considerably below those of typical middle class children. Advocacy of value-added comparisons as a preferred alternative to comparing raw achievement levels for accountability purposes makes sense because it recognizes that most children from poor families start their educations at a significant educational disadvantage to most middle class children, and that during their schooling, middle class children continue to enjoy extra-school educational benefits that children living in poverty do not possess. Advocacy of value-added comparisons makes no sense if you believe that good schools can fully overcome the social and economic influences that depress low-income children's achievement.
Thus, before we can shed light, rather than heat, on this discussion, we need more precision about what Mr. Finn means by an "appreciably higher plane." What does he claim that good schools can actually accomplish? At present, for example, the average achievement of black and white children in America differs by about a full standard deviation, or about 30 percentile points in a distribution, on most standardized tests - and we have no measures whatsoever of the black-white gap on the many school outcomes which such tests don't measure but which Mr. Finn, in his many writings, has also asserted that good schools produce, such as character, citizenship, and work ethic. Social scientists generally consider an intervention to be extraordinarily successful if it has an effect size of 0.5, or more than 15 percentile points. Such an impact of good schools would truly be extraordinary – my guess (without evidence) is that the best school reform, even including the extended school time that Mr. Finn advocates, might aspire to an effect size of 0.3, or about 10 percentile points. So let's assume that school reform, with an effect size of 0.5, might reduce the gap to half a standard deviation, and that this is what Mr. Finn means by "an appreciably higher plane." This would still leave an enormous achievement gap, and typical black students would still not be able to compete fully successfully with typical whites in the world of academia, the professions, or other skilled work. But a school effect size on average black achievement of 0.5, or even of 0.3, would be a significant accomplishment: although there would still be a big gap in average performance, this shift in the distributions, resulting in greater overlap between black and white achievement, would allow many more black youths to compete successfully than can now do so.
This brings me to the second imprecision in the discussion. Mr. Finn speaks of the impact of good schools on "poor kids' achievement." Which "poor kids"? Mr. Finn’s claim makes sense only if we focus on average "poor kids' achievement." Any particular school, whether it is a typical or a "good" school, may have a larger than usual share of children who are above, or below average for all poor children. As the previous paragraph suggested, the variation in poor children's achievement is wide, as is the variation in middle class children's achievement, as is the variation in most human characteristics. Indeed, once you have controlled for major demographic factors, like race and poverty, there is more variation in within-school achievement than in average achievement between schools. A broad range of children's achievement exists even under conditions of constant school quality, or identical income, identical family structure, identical neighborhood influences, or identical peer effects. Consequently, it is no simple task to compare the achievement of ‘poor’ children in one school setting to those in another: one must identify the prior achievement of particular students (not their school’s average achievement) and a host of other characteristics of the students. It would be useful and important to know whether such detailed comparisons of student performance can identify schools that substantially "beat the odds" and beat them to an extent that lifts students to middle class achievement levels. I know of no accounts of "beat the odds" schools that have attempted, or been able, to do this.
In almost every school, even poorly run regular urban public schools serving disadvantaged children, some children are "above average." Such disadvantaged children who are, even absent school reform, performing at or close to typical middle class levels have not "closed the achievement gap." They simply reflect the inevitable variation in performance that exists even after any social characteristic, like poverty, is controlled. And if such children can then be placed in a separate school, the average achievement of this new school will be high, even if it has no greater quality than the unreformed school from which these children came. Such a new school, notwithstanding its high average achievement for disadvantaged children, cannot be said to "beat the odds," as the term is commonly understood.
So the critical empirical question is this: Mr. Finn alludes to the "wealth of anecdote, example, and research attesting to the success of individual schools in '''beating the odds' and producing well-educated youngsters in spite of the hostile forces at work in many of those kids' lives." Do these individual schools enroll children who reflect the full range of ability of all disadvantaged children (those who ordinarily would perform below, close to, or above average), or do they enroll children who have, on average, greater readiness to learn than typical disadvantaged children – because the enrolled children are, on average, relatively more advantaged in home environment, motivation, health, natural ability, or other characteristics than the average for all disadvantaged children? In other words, are these schools either explicitly selective, or implicitly selective (for example, because the more advantaged of disadvantaged children are more likely to choose to attend, or have parents who choose for them to attend)?
I have spent considerable effort in recent years examining claims like those of Mr. Finn, and have found that in every case, highly publicized "beat the odds" schools enroll children who are more likely to have higher achievement, often because they have some particular more favorable characteristic that influences achievement. (Examples from the Heritage report that Mr. Finn cites are a school where most children are poor but which is the location of a district-wide "gifted and talented" program whose test scores are included in the school's averages; and schools where most children are poor but where an unusually high proportion of parents have college degrees.) I do not suggest that this means these are not good schools. They may be. But even if so, only part of their higher achievement can be attributed to the quality of the schools. Some other part is attributable to the atypical potential of their students.
I will not engage in an extended discussion of the results of my examinations here. I detailed some of them in my book, Class and Schools (pp 61-83) (http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/books_class_and_schools ). With respect to the schools that Mr. Finn specifically cites in "March of the Pessimists," I showed that the Heritage Foundation's "No Excuses" schools were mostly selective, even though the students were mostly disadvantaged by low-income or minority status; utilizing analyses performed by Douglas Harris (http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/documents/EPSL-0603-120-EPRU.pdf), I reported that the Ed Trust "high flying schools" most often had high percentages of students above proficiency because the schools were in states where the proficiency standard had been diluted (an action that Mr. Finn himself has properly denounced), or had inconsistent high performance – in only one subject, only one grade, only one year; and I demonstrated that KIPP schools enroll students whose incoming capacity was better than the average capacity of the students in the schools from which they transferred. (The fact that KIPP attracts large numbers of such students, and must select its incoming class from these applicants by lottery, sheds no light on whether the pools in which the lotteries are conducted are representative. Nor does the fact that KIPP makes efforts to solicit applications from typical students shed such light – parents able or inclined, for whatever reason, to provide above-average support to their children are more likely to respond to such solicitations than other parents in the same communities and with the same income levels; to be used for the point Mr. Finn wishes, KIPP would have to enroll not only typical disadvantaged children, but a representative share of disadvantaged children with below-average potential, when compared to other disadvantaged children, as well.)
Following Diana Jean Schemo's article in the New York Times, Joel I. Klein, Chancellor of the New York City schools, published a letter to the Times (August 15) in which he claimed that in contrast to New York's typical regular public high schools with their high dropout rates, in "New York’s new small schools, serving the same [disadvantaged] populations, graduation rates are projected to be 73 percent." I have not done a systematic study of these small schools. But I am familiar with enough of them to say that many of these schools, before admitting students, conduct recruiting fairs, examine applicants' test scores, and interview prospective students and their parents. Information gained is then used either explicitly for purposes of acceptance or rejection,
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or less openly to encourage applications from students with greater potential and to discourage applications from students with greater difficulties. Further, in establishing the small schools, Mr. Klein exempted them from having to accept, at least initially, special education students in self-contained classes and students who were not fluent in English. New York's typical regular public high schools, of course, include such students whose presence brings down their graduation rates. Perhaps if these new small schools enrolled representative adolescents from the same populations, their projected graduation rates would still be higher than those of regular schools. But before evaluating the significance of Mr. Klein's claims, we need to know whether, and by how much, this may be the case.
Again, I have no quarrel with any of these schools. They may be better, even much better, than typical public schools. But although Mr. Finn cites three decades of research on this point, I am aware of none that distinguishes the extent to which the standardized test scores of "beat the odds" schools are attributable to school practices or to students with greater capacity to benefit from those school practices.
Nor do I have a quarrel with schools that select, either explicitly or implicitly, disadvantaged students who have a greater capacity to succeed. To enhance social mobility and equality in American society, we should do everything we can to give the most able disadvantaged and minority students a boost with the best possible education, so that they can more successfully compete for college and professional jobs with students from more privileged families. If doing this requires that the more advantaged and able of all disadvantaged students be concentrated in special schools, and isolated from the destructive influences of more troubled peers, such policies should be followed. But social and educational policy is complex – most interventions are neither all good nor all bad, and the best of them may have some negative, if unintended consequences. When disadvantaged students with the greatest likelihood of success are selected out of typical public schools to concentrate and reinforce these students' potential, students with less likelihood of success who remain in typical schools are also concentrated, and their lower aspirations also reinforced. As I wrote in another book (The Charter School Dust-Up (http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/book_charter_school), with co-authors Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Lawrence Mishel), there is too little public discussion of how to balance the costs and benefits of this policy. If concentrating the more able and advantaged of disadvantaged students in better schools not only improves the chances of these students, but also harms the chances of less able and more disadvantaged students left behind, how aggressively should such policies be pursued? There is a large literature on the costs and benefits of heterogeneous vs. homogeneous grouping of students within schools and classrooms. The difficult issues are the same when we consider between-schools selectivity, but a careful consideration of these issues has not made its way into our public debates about the merits of schools that "beat the odds."
In Ms. Schemo's article, I was quoted as saying that schools can't do "much better" without complementary reform in the social and economic conditions from which disadvantaged children come. This was an unfortunate phrase, as imprecise as Mr. Finn's notion that such schools can do "appreciably" better. What I have consistently written is that school reform alone can narrow the achievement gap, but cannot close it. Whether there is a significant difference between saying schools can't do "much better" and that they can do "appreciably better" cannot be determined unless we are more precise in measuring the extent to which schools can raise average achievement for the full range of disadvantaged children. Until we have done so, we can't know how much Mr. Finn and I truly disagree.
The reason I consider this imprecision such a serious issue is, as I wrote in Class and Schools, if we truly believe that school improvement alone can close (or even come reasonably close to closing) the achievement gap, then, as Mayor Bloomberg suggested, we need not worry terribly much about the serious social problems facing American society. All these problems – racial discrimination, economic inequality, inequitable access to health care, dysfunctional families and neighborhoods – will take care of themselves. But if school improvement alone cannot close (or come close to closing) the achievement gap, then assertions to the contrary have the effect of undermining public and political pressure to take action to reform other social and economic institutions, making a significant narrowing of the achievement gap less likely. In this sense, the rhetoric of school reform is counter-productive and dangerous.
Nearly 40 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Frederick Mosteller rejected the notion that the Coleman Report was a "pessimistic" document. On the contrary, they wrote, it was a hopeful and radical document, because it showed that we could identify (and address) the causes of low average achievement for black children – these causes were mostly in the social and economic circumstances of these children's lives, and many (though not all) of these circumstances were remediable by well-designed social and economic policies. Today, many of those policies that we know will make a difference - providing better and more stable housing, improving the health of low-income children, and boosting the incomes of these students' working parents – are economically and politically feasible. So in the Moynihan-Mosteller sense, I too am an optimist. I invite Mr. Finn to join me in my optimism by advocating a balanced set of reform policies, covering schools as well as the social and economic conditions that surround them.
He has begun. By advocating schools that are "starting young and running really long days, weeks and years," by acknowledging that such schools "cost more," Mr. Finn is proposing that we dramatically expand public responsibility for aspects of youth development that are not traditionally the province of public education. I don't know if he has ever tried to estimate how much such an expansion of public responsibility would cost. If he has, he might find that we are not that far apart in our views of what meaningful school improvement requires. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that adding public responsibility for four or five years of early childhood care and education, after-school (doubling the in-school hours), and summer time (another three full-time months) for disadvantaged children could easily triple what we now spend for the public education of these children. Mr. Finn expects that some of this increase can be offset by "sweat equity from tireless teachers and relentless principals" who, unlike the rest of us, will not expect to be fully compensated for their efforts. I don't think that this is a reasonable source for a significant portion of the costs, but even if it contributed some, if we assume that 25 percent of all children would require such additional services, we'd increase our national average per pupil spending by something like 50 percent. If we add health clinics and a few other social services that we can all agree can counter the most important negative influences on children's development, we're close to increasing our national average spending by 60 or 70 percent. Perhaps, if we did all this for all chools serving disadvantaged students, it would still be possible for the best of these schools to "beat the odds" by improving outcomes for disadvantaged children even more than typical public schools could do with their expanded resources. That would be a competition worth watching.
Monday, September 18, 2006
American Traditions of Schooling
I take the following excerpt from an essay I've just read by Diane Ravitch, entitled American Traditions of Education. What follows is the last page or two of that essay. I agree with her statement taken from the final paragraph below: "What does seem likely is that the public will not indefinitely support schools in which children do not learn the skills and knowledge that they require for participation in our society."
As this brief overview of the history of schooling suggests, there are many traditions of schooling in the United States.
The first and most important tradition is that the family is primarily responsible for its children’s education. In the colonial era as well as in most of the nineteenth century, families played a large role in teaching their children to read, reading poetry from the schoolbooks at the dinner table or at the fireside, and deciding where to send their children to school.
The second important tradition is pluralism. Until well into the nineteenth century, there was no single pattern of schooling. Children and adults learned in a variety of settings, including dame schools, public schools, academies, private schools, church schools, Sunday schools, libraries, and lyceums.
The third important tradition is the American common school, or public school. Since the mid–nineteenth century, public schools have been broadly available to American children in almost every community; by 1900, elementary school enrollment was nearly universal, thanks to the widespread availability of free public schooling. Secondary enrollments grew far more slowly, in large part because young people did not need a high school education to get a good job. In 1900, only about 10 percent of teenagers were enrolled in high school; this figure did not reach 70 percent until 1940 and now is about 95 percent. About 90 percent of American students are enrolled in public schools.
The fourth important tradition is one of cooperation between public and private sectors to achieve valuable social goals. Public schools often find it necessary and useful to reach out to the private sector for assistance. Nonpublic organizations run preschool centers, Head Start centers, after-school programs, tutoring programs, and many other educational services. Since the early 1990s, the public/private nexus has produced a hybrid agency called charter schools. These may be the lineal descendant of the nineteenthcentury academy (although the original academy was a secondary school, and today’s charter schools may offer any grade configuration). The modern charter school, like the academy, has an independent board of trustees, survives only because its students choose to enroll, and receives public funding on a per-pupil basis (unlike charter schools, academies were partially subsidized by tuition).
It is not altogether clear how Americans in the twenty-first century will draw on these historic traditions. What does seem likely is that the public will not indefinitely support schools in which children do not learn the skills and knowledge that they require for participation in our society. What has changed, and changed dramatically over the past two hundred years, is the importance of education. Globalization has changed our economy and made education a civic, social, and economic imperative. Young people who do not acquire the skills of literacy and numeracy and a solid education will find themselves locked out of all sorts of future opportunities. This is not tolerable for our society, and our pragmatic bent will prod us toward finding additional ways to spread the promise of education throughout the population.
As this brief overview of the history of schooling suggests, there are many traditions of schooling in the United States.
The first and most important tradition is that the family is primarily responsible for its children’s education. In the colonial era as well as in most of the nineteenth century, families played a large role in teaching their children to read, reading poetry from the schoolbooks at the dinner table or at the fireside, and deciding where to send their children to school.
The second important tradition is pluralism. Until well into the nineteenth century, there was no single pattern of schooling. Children and adults learned in a variety of settings, including dame schools, public schools, academies, private schools, church schools, Sunday schools, libraries, and lyceums.
The third important tradition is the American common school, or public school. Since the mid–nineteenth century, public schools have been broadly available to American children in almost every community; by 1900, elementary school enrollment was nearly universal, thanks to the widespread availability of free public schooling. Secondary enrollments grew far more slowly, in large part because young people did not need a high school education to get a good job. In 1900, only about 10 percent of teenagers were enrolled in high school; this figure did not reach 70 percent until 1940 and now is about 95 percent. About 90 percent of American students are enrolled in public schools.
The fourth important tradition is one of cooperation between public and private sectors to achieve valuable social goals. Public schools often find it necessary and useful to reach out to the private sector for assistance. Nonpublic organizations run preschool centers, Head Start centers, after-school programs, tutoring programs, and many other educational services. Since the early 1990s, the public/private nexus has produced a hybrid agency called charter schools. These may be the lineal descendant of the nineteenthcentury academy (although the original academy was a secondary school, and today’s charter schools may offer any grade configuration). The modern charter school, like the academy, has an independent board of trustees, survives only because its students choose to enroll, and receives public funding on a per-pupil basis (unlike charter schools, academies were partially subsidized by tuition).
It is not altogether clear how Americans in the twenty-first century will draw on these historic traditions. What does seem likely is that the public will not indefinitely support schools in which children do not learn the skills and knowledge that they require for participation in our society. What has changed, and changed dramatically over the past two hundred years, is the importance of education. Globalization has changed our economy and made education a civic, social, and economic imperative. Young people who do not acquire the skills of literacy and numeracy and a solid education will find themselves locked out of all sorts of future opportunities. This is not tolerable for our society, and our pragmatic bent will prod us toward finding additional ways to spread the promise of education throughout the population.
Jencks, Is the Public School Obsolete?
Is the public school obsolete ?
By CHRISTOPHER JENCKS
(From the Public Interest, Winter, 1966)
The problems of education in the slums can be grouped under two broad headings: inadequate public support and excessive bureaucratic timidity and defeatism. Both have been catalogued adnauseam elsewhere, but a brief review is needed to put the remedies I want to discuss in context.
I -The money problem
As a rule of thumb, America spends about half as much educating the children of the poor as the children of the rich. The difference derives from two factors. First, the annual expenditure per pupil in a prosperous suburb is usually at least fifty percent more than in a slum in the same metropolitan area. Second, this additional expenditure, in combination with better family and neighborhood conditions, encourages suburban children to stay in school half again as long as slum children (from kindergarten through college, instead of from first through tenth or eleventh grade). The cumulative result, in round figures, is that the taxpayers typically spend less than $5,000 for the formal education of most slum children compared to more than $10,000 for many suburban children. If America were to try to provide all her children with equal opportunity to develop their talents, obtain ample adult incomes, and share in controlling their own and their community's future, this pattern of expenditure would probably have to be reversed. If we wanted to offset the mis-education which takes place in a slum home and neighborhood, we would probably have to spend twice as much on formal education in the slums as we do in the suburbs. Instead of starting slum children in school later than suburban children, as we now do, we would have to start them earlier. Instead of keeping slum schools open fewer hours per day than suburban schools, and providing fewer slum children with opportunities to study all year round, we would have to reverse the balance. Instead of creating schools which encourage slum children to drop out as soon as possible, we would have to find ways to keep the slum child learning even longer than suburbanites. Instead of having larger classes, worse books and shoddier buildings in the slums than in the suburbs, we would have to reverse the pattern - aiming, for example, at an average class size in the slums of 15-20 children instead of 35. Instead of spending less - often much less - than $500 per child per year for education in the slums, we would have to spend more like $1500 per year. Hopefully, the result would be that slum children stayed in school longer than suburbanites, qualifying themselves for professional jobs in which skill can offset the wrong background. Instead of a cumulative total of less than $5000 per child, we would have to aim at a total of perhaps $25,000.
In strictly fiscal terms this would not be much of a strain on the national economy. There are something like ten million children now growing up in what the Johnson Administration has defined as poverty. Raising expenditures on such children's education to $1500 per year would cost the nation something like $11 billion annually; providing them with pre-schools, kindergartens, and colleges might add another $8 billion to the bill. In the long run there is abundant evidence that this investment would repay itself by raising taxable income and by cutting expenditures for welfare, unemployment, police and other slum symptoms. Even in the short run $11 billion for better education would place comparatively little burden on a well managed economy. Assuming the President continues to listen to liberal rather than conservative economists, the GNP should increase by at least $150 billion between now and 1970, and federal tax receipts should go up at least $30 billion if the present tax structure is maintained. Unless the Vietnam war spreads, Congress could increase the authorization under Title 1 of the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, to $20 billion by 1970 without straining the federal budget.
But of course this is not going to happen. Almost nobody really wants to make America an egalitarian society. Ours is a competitive society, in which some people do extremely well and others do equally badly, and most people are willing to keep it that way. For as long as anyone can remember, for example, the richest fifth of the population has earned about ten times as much as the poorest fifth. The ability to influence political and personal events is probably even less equally distributed. As a result, there is enormous competition for the jobs which provide comfort and personal power. And despite a lot of pious rhetoric about equality of opportunity in this competition, most parents want their children to have a more than equal chance of success. Since access to good schools and colleges has become increasingly critical in this struggle, there is constant competition to guarantee one's children access to the "best" schools. This means that if the schools down the road get better, local ideals will rise too. If other schools raise their salaries and begin to lure the best teachers, local schools will respond by doing likewise - if they can. If Washington begins to pour large sums of money into the slums to equalize opportunity, middle class areas will respond by pouring even more money into their schools, in order to keep ahead. Or, to be more realistic, they will begin demanding that Washington help middle-class as well as slum schools. If they don't get the money from Washington they will turn to their state legislatures, where they are likely to get a sympathetic hearing.
The fact is that American society, while providing almost unlimited opportunities for particularly gifted individuals, does not provide unlimited opportunity for its people as a whole. On the contrary, American society has always been organized on the assumption that while some will do very well, many will do very badly. Equality of opportunity therefore means not just an equal opportunity for everyone to become President, but an equal opportunity for everyone to end up a street cleaner. No sane family or community wants that kind of equality for their children. They struggle to keep that kind of opportunity as unequal as possible. Inevitably, those who have money and influence struggle more successfully than those who do not. Children who grow up in the slums can see this. They know that America contains failures as well as successes, jobs which pay desperately low wages as well as jobs which pay extremely good ones, styles of life which are miserable as well as styles which are comfortable. Unless they have both unusual faith and unusual talent, they know that their future is, at best, one of comparative failure. It is this comparison, far more than absolute deprivation, which underlies the sickness of today's slums. It is this comparison with the rest of America which makes jobs and living standards that seemed more than adequate a generation ago seem intolerable today. (It is no accident that the "poverty line" shifts from one generation to another. As a rule of thumb, we can predict that any family which makes less than half the national average will feel poor, and will be defined as poor by liberal economists.)
This comparative standard must also be kept in mind when evaluating programs for upgrading slum schools. A man's employment prospects are not improved by teaching him ten percent more if, at the same time, all his neighbors are being taught twenty percent more. Increasing a school's budget by fifty percent will not equalize the opportunities open to its students if, at the same time, competing schools also get 50 or even 100 percent more money.
II -The bureaucracy problem
It would be politically difficult to equalize opportunity between the slums and the suburbs under the best of circumstances. But not even the better financed slum schools (e.g. those in Harlem, on which more money is spent than in most suburbs outside the New York area) achieve results comparable to suburban systems. This in turn makes it even more difficult to raise the necessary money than it would otherwise be. If an extra $20 billion a year would bring slum children up to the academic level of their suburban rivals, some legislators would support the expenditure out of idealism. But many legislators feel - and not without reason - that even if they gave the schools an unlimited budget, the children of the slums would continue to grow up both personally and academically crippled.
These fears may be exaggerated. They certainly ought to be tested empirically before being accepted at face value. The Ford Foundation, for example, instead of sprinkling money around in dozens of different projects and places, ought to try raising school expenditures in one slum area to, say, double the level in nearby suburbs just to see what would happen. It would, of course, take many years to tell. Children who were more than two or three when the experiment began would already have been scarred, often hopelessly, by the existing system. It would be a generation before the impact of the extra money on today's infants could be fully weighed. But if it turned out that an extra $100 million a year made a dramatic difference in, say, the slums of Washington, D. C., it would become very much easier to get comparable sums from taxpayers in other areas.
Unfortunately, an extra $100 million might not make a dramatic difference in Washington - or in most other places either. Much that has been said and written about slum schools, not only in Washington but in places where race is not an issue, suggests that inadequate funds are only part of their problem. They also have the wrong motives and objectives. Some slum schools seem to be less educational than penal institutions. Their function is more to pacify the young' than to teach them. They are ruled by fear, not love, infected by boredom, not curiosity. Such schools should not be given more money; they should be closed.
The roots of the problem go very deep. At times the problem seems to be public control itself. Because the slum school is public, it is accountable to the taxpayer. As in every other public enterprise, this kind of minute accountability to publicity-hungry elected officials leads to timidity among the employees. Public control puts a premium not on achieving a few spectacular successes but on avoiding any spectacular failures. In this respect there is not much difference between education and other fields of public endeavor. Nevertheless, public control over education has achieved a sanctity and respectability which public control over other enterprises has never mustered. Conversely, the ideologists of private enterprise have, with the conspicuous exception of Milton Friedman, been comparatively slow to apply their arguments in behalf of private schools.
Yet public control is not a sufficient explanation of the problems of the slum school, for public control seems to have worked quite well in some suburbs and small towns. The problem seems to be that in the slums public control has been linked to inadequate funds for performing the job assigned. Slum schools have found it difficult to get extra money even when there was reason to believe that the marginal return on this money would be very good. Educators might argue, for example, that doubling expenditures in the slums would treble results. But since we have no good way to measure this, skeptical legislators have been slow to provide extra money. As a result, pay scales in big city school systems have been too low to compete with most other jobs requiring equivalent training, skill, and masochism. And so, in turn, many slum teachers and administrators have comparatively little competence, confidence or commitment.
In city after city this has led to the creation of a system of education whose first axiom is that everyone, on every level, is incompetent and irresponsible. From this axiom comes the corollary that everyone must be carefully watched by a superior. The school board has no faith in the central administration, the central administration has no faith in the principals, the principals have no faith in the teachers, and the teachers have no faith in the students. Decision-making is constantly centralized into as few hands as possible rather than being decentralized into as many hands as possible, in the hope of reducing errors to a minimum. Of course such a system also reduces individual initiative to a minimum, but that is a price which a publicly-controlled bureaucracy, whose aim is not profits but survival, usually seems willing to pay. In such a system it seems natural not to give the principal of a school control over his budget, not to give teachers control over their syllabus, and not to give the students control over anything. Distrust is the order of the day, symbolized by the elaborate accounting system, the endless forms to be filled out for the central office, the time clocks and the two-way radios for monitoring classrooms from the front office, the constant tests and elaborate regulations for students.
In such a system everyone gets along by going along with the man over him. Most come to see themselves as play actors. The student tries to dope out what the teacher wants, and gives it to him. Usually all he wants is a reasonable amount of quiet in class and some appearance of docility in doing assignments. The teachers, in turn, try to figure out what the principal wants. That usually means filing grades and attendance records promptly, keeping trouble over discipline to a minimum, and avoiding complaints from parents or students. The principal, in turn, tries to keep the central administration happy (and the administration tries to keep the school board happy) by not sticking his neck out and by damping down "trouble" before it gets "out of hand."
Organizational sclerosis of this kind is extremely difficult to cure. For obvious reasons innovation from the bottom up becomes impossible and unthinkable. But even innovation from the top down is difficult. It is easy to get people to go through the form of change, but it is almost impossible to get them to really change, because they are frozen into defensive postures based on years of stand-pattism. If the principal tells the teachers he wants them to revamp the curriculum, they immediately begin looking to him - not to their students in the classroom - for cues and clues about what kinds of changes to propose. If the teachers tell the students to think for themselves, the students interpret this as just another move by the teacher to complicate "the game," another frustration in their efforts to "give the teacher what he wants." If the school board tries raising salaries in order to attract new kinds of teachers, it must still assign them to the same old schools, where they are still treated like filing clerks. So the more imaginative and dedicated teachers leave after a year or two for other schools - often in suburbia - which treat them better. In such circumstances more money may just mean more of the same.
A business which becomes afflicted with this kind of disease either goes bankrupt or else creates a monopoly or cartel to protect itself from more dynamic competition. The same is true of school systems. Were it not for their monopoly on educational opportunities for the poor, most big city school systems would probably go out of business. If, for example, the poor were simply given the money that is now spent on their children's education in public schools, and were told they could spend this money in private institutions, private schools would begin to spring up to serve slum children. In due course such schools would probably enroll the great majority of these children. The case of the parochial schools illustrates this point. These schools are seldom really free, but many parents, including some non-Catholics, make considerable sacrifices to send their children to them. In some cases, of course, this is a matter of religious faith. But if one asks parents why they prefer the parochial schools, the answer is often that they think the schooling itself is better than what the public schools in their area offer. Evidence collected by Peter Rossi and Andrew Greeley of the National Opinion Research Center suggests that the parochial schools usually do do more for their students than their public competitors, at least judging by the records of their alumni. This seems to be so despite the fact that they have less money, pay lower salaries to lay teachers, have larger classes, older buildings, and fewer amenities of every sort.
There is, of course, considerable reluctance among non-Catholics (and also among anti-clerical Catholics) to admit that the parochial schools might be doing something of value. Most non-Catholics, including myself, have an instinctive distrust of the Church. We have readily accepted the proposition that its schools were "divisive," despite research evidence which shows that aside from their religious practices parochial school graduates have about the same habits and values as Catholics who attend public schools. A similar prejudice clouds efforts to discuss what have traditionally been called "private" schools. Educators have taught us to use "public" as a synonym for, “democratic" or just plain "good", and to associate "private" with elitist" and "inequality." In part this is because when we think of a “public" school we conjure up a small-town or suburban school which is responsible and responsive to those whom it serves; a "private" school, on the other hand, is imagined as a posh country club for the sons of the rich. Yet using this kind of language to describe the "public" schools of Harlem surely obscures as much as it reveals. The Harlem schools are hardly more responsible or responsive to those whom they nominally serve than the typical "private" school. They are "public" only in the legal sense that the Post Office, for example, is "public", i.e., they are tax supported, open to all, ultimately answerable to public officials who have almost no interest in them. Conversely, while it is true that "private" schools have in the past catered mainly to the well-off, this seems to reflect economic necessity more than social prejudice. If the poor were given as much money to spend on education as the rich, there is every reason to assume that the private sector would expand to accommodate them. Indeed, if we were to judge schools by their willingness to subsidize the poor, we would have to say that private schools have shown more interest in the poor than public ones. Has any suburban board of education used its own money to provide scholarships for slum children? Most refuse to admit such children even if their way is paid. Many private boards of trustees, on the other hand, have made such efforts, albeit on a small scale.
Private control has several advantages in a school which serves slum children. To begin with, it makes it possible to attack the problem in manageable bites. It is inconceivable that a big city school system can be reformed all at once. Failing that, however, it may be impossible to reform it at all. If, for example, the system is geared to docile teachers who do not want and cannot handle responsibility, how is it to accommodate the enterprising minority who have ideas of their own and want freedom to try them out? The superintendent cannot alter the whole system to deal with a handful of such teachers, even if be wants to. But if be does not alter the system, the better teachers will usually leave - or not come in the first place. Somehow the system must be broken up so that its parts can develop at different paces, in different styles, and even in different directions. Little cells of excellence must be nourished, gradually adding to their own number and excitement. Unusual talent must not be spread so thin over the whole system that no single place achieves the critical mass needed to sustain a chain reaction. Yet this is just what a conventional, centrally controlled system tends to do, for in such a system "special treatment" for a particular school is quickly defined as "favoritism." (This attitude is illustrated in the response of big cities to the offer of federal funds under the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Almost nobody wants to concentrate this money in a few places to create really good schools; everyone wants to spread it across the whole system.)
A second virtue of private schools is that they get away from the increasingly irrelevant tradition of neighborhood schools. Every psychologist and sociologist now recognizes that what children learn formally from their teachers is only a small fraction of their overall education. What they learn informally from their classmates is equally or more important. For this reason it is extremely important to expose slum children to classmates who teach them things which will be an asset rather than a liability as they grow older. A school which draws only from the slum itself will not provide this kind of stimulus. Instead, ways must be found to mix slum children with racially and economically different classmates.
In principle, of course, this kind of ethnic and economic mixing ought to be easier within a public system than a private one. But this may not be so in practice. In a publicly controlled system every school is required to follow essentially the same educational policies and practices as every other one. This means that the differences between schools derive largely if not exclusively from the differences in their student bodies. (Ability to hold good administrators and teachers seems to depend largely on this, for example.) So long as the student “mix" is decisive, middle-class parents are understandably reluctant to send their children to school with substantial numbers of lowerclass children. White parents feel the same way about schools with large numbers of Negro children. But if the traditions and distinctive identity of a school depend not on the character of the student body but on the special objectives and methods of the staff, middle-class parents who approve of these objectives and methods will often send their children despite the presence of poorer classmates. This is clearest, perhaps, in the parochial schools. It might also be possible in non-sectarian private schools, if these had the money to give poor children scholarships, or if outside groups provided such scholarships to large numbers of children.
Getting rid of the neighborhood school, whether by creating city-wide public schools or private ones, could also have the virtue of providing the poor with a real choice about the kinds of schools their children attend. At present, the neighborhood school must try to be all things to all people in its area. Anything daring is bound to displease somebody, and so must be avoided. But if schools could simply tell those who disliked their methods to look elsewhere, and could look all over a large city for a clientele which wanted a particular brand of education, there would be a better chance both for innovation in the schools and for satisfying the diverse needs of different students. It should be possible, for example, for poor people to send their children to a school which segregates the sexes, or employs the Montessorri method, or teaches reading phonetically, or emulates the Summerhill approach. Not everyone wants such things, but some do, and they should be able to get them. Given the present outlook of the men who control big city public schools, the only way to make these choices available is probably in the private sector.
In principle there are two ways to develop a larger measure of private initiative and room for maneuver in educating the poor. One would be to provide tuition grants to children who opted out of the public-controlled schools, equal to what would be spent on them if they stayed in. These tuition grants could be used to pay the bills in private schools. There are not, of course, enough private schools today to handle all the potential applicants from the slums, but more would spring up if money were available. But even without tuition grants it should be possible to create much more diversity and decentralization in the schools. School boards could, for example, contract with various groups to manage particular schools in their own system.
A university might be given contract to run a model school system in the slums, as suggested by the Panel on Educational Research and Development of the President's Science Advisory Committee. This is apparently to be tried in New York.
A local business group might also take over the management of a school. (If Litton Industries can run a job Corps camp, it can surely run a school.)
A group of teachers might incorporate itself to manage a school on contract from the citywide board. This could be done at no expense within the present system, using present personnel and facilities, and it might have appreciable advantages. Suppose, for example, that the New York City Board of Education were to rent its facilities to their present staffs and provide them with a management contract subject to annual review. Ultimate control over the school could be vested in the teachers, who would hire administrators. Hiring and firing teachers, budget-making, programming and so forth would all be decided on the spot. If the school did a poor job - which some surely would - the contract could be terminated. A group of parents, working through an elected board, might also take over a school. This alternative, which should be especially appealing to the New Left and to the prophets of "community action," is perhaps better described as a new kind of public control than as private control. In effect, it would mean replacing responsibility to the taxpayer-stockholder with responsibility to the consumer - a kind of educational cooperative.
All these alternatives aim at a radical decentralization of both power and responsibility. All would liberate the schools from the dead hand of central administration, from minute accountability to the public for every penny, every minute, and every word. They all recognize that so far as the slum child is concerned, the present system of "socialized education" has failed, and that some kind of new departure, either "capitalist" or "syndicalist," is needed.
Either tuition grants or management contracts to private organizations would, of course, "destroy the public school system as we know it." When one thinks of the remarkable past achievements of public education in America, this may seem a foolish step. But we must not allow the memory of past achievements to blind us to present failures. Nor should we allow the rhetoric of public school men to obscure the issue. It is natural for public servants to complain about private competition, just as private business complains about public competition. But if the terms of the competition are reasonable, there is every reason to suppose that it is healthy. Without it, both public and private enterprises have a way of ossifying. And if, as some fear, the public schools could not survive in open competition with private ones, then perhaps they should not survive.
By CHRISTOPHER JENCKS
(From the Public Interest, Winter, 1966)
The problems of education in the slums can be grouped under two broad headings: inadequate public support and excessive bureaucratic timidity and defeatism. Both have been catalogued adnauseam elsewhere, but a brief review is needed to put the remedies I want to discuss in context.
I -The money problem
As a rule of thumb, America spends about half as much educating the children of the poor as the children of the rich. The difference derives from two factors. First, the annual expenditure per pupil in a prosperous suburb is usually at least fifty percent more than in a slum in the same metropolitan area. Second, this additional expenditure, in combination with better family and neighborhood conditions, encourages suburban children to stay in school half again as long as slum children (from kindergarten through college, instead of from first through tenth or eleventh grade). The cumulative result, in round figures, is that the taxpayers typically spend less than $5,000 for the formal education of most slum children compared to more than $10,000 for many suburban children. If America were to try to provide all her children with equal opportunity to develop their talents, obtain ample adult incomes, and share in controlling their own and their community's future, this pattern of expenditure would probably have to be reversed. If we wanted to offset the mis-education which takes place in a slum home and neighborhood, we would probably have to spend twice as much on formal education in the slums as we do in the suburbs. Instead of starting slum children in school later than suburban children, as we now do, we would have to start them earlier. Instead of keeping slum schools open fewer hours per day than suburban schools, and providing fewer slum children with opportunities to study all year round, we would have to reverse the balance. Instead of creating schools which encourage slum children to drop out as soon as possible, we would have to find ways to keep the slum child learning even longer than suburbanites. Instead of having larger classes, worse books and shoddier buildings in the slums than in the suburbs, we would have to reverse the pattern - aiming, for example, at an average class size in the slums of 15-20 children instead of 35. Instead of spending less - often much less - than $500 per child per year for education in the slums, we would have to spend more like $1500 per year. Hopefully, the result would be that slum children stayed in school longer than suburbanites, qualifying themselves for professional jobs in which skill can offset the wrong background. Instead of a cumulative total of less than $5000 per child, we would have to aim at a total of perhaps $25,000.
In strictly fiscal terms this would not be much of a strain on the national economy. There are something like ten million children now growing up in what the Johnson Administration has defined as poverty. Raising expenditures on such children's education to $1500 per year would cost the nation something like $11 billion annually; providing them with pre-schools, kindergartens, and colleges might add another $8 billion to the bill. In the long run there is abundant evidence that this investment would repay itself by raising taxable income and by cutting expenditures for welfare, unemployment, police and other slum symptoms. Even in the short run $11 billion for better education would place comparatively little burden on a well managed economy. Assuming the President continues to listen to liberal rather than conservative economists, the GNP should increase by at least $150 billion between now and 1970, and federal tax receipts should go up at least $30 billion if the present tax structure is maintained. Unless the Vietnam war spreads, Congress could increase the authorization under Title 1 of the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, to $20 billion by 1970 without straining the federal budget.
But of course this is not going to happen. Almost nobody really wants to make America an egalitarian society. Ours is a competitive society, in which some people do extremely well and others do equally badly, and most people are willing to keep it that way. For as long as anyone can remember, for example, the richest fifth of the population has earned about ten times as much as the poorest fifth. The ability to influence political and personal events is probably even less equally distributed. As a result, there is enormous competition for the jobs which provide comfort and personal power. And despite a lot of pious rhetoric about equality of opportunity in this competition, most parents want their children to have a more than equal chance of success. Since access to good schools and colleges has become increasingly critical in this struggle, there is constant competition to guarantee one's children access to the "best" schools. This means that if the schools down the road get better, local ideals will rise too. If other schools raise their salaries and begin to lure the best teachers, local schools will respond by doing likewise - if they can. If Washington begins to pour large sums of money into the slums to equalize opportunity, middle class areas will respond by pouring even more money into their schools, in order to keep ahead. Or, to be more realistic, they will begin demanding that Washington help middle-class as well as slum schools. If they don't get the money from Washington they will turn to their state legislatures, where they are likely to get a sympathetic hearing.
The fact is that American society, while providing almost unlimited opportunities for particularly gifted individuals, does not provide unlimited opportunity for its people as a whole. On the contrary, American society has always been organized on the assumption that while some will do very well, many will do very badly. Equality of opportunity therefore means not just an equal opportunity for everyone to become President, but an equal opportunity for everyone to end up a street cleaner. No sane family or community wants that kind of equality for their children. They struggle to keep that kind of opportunity as unequal as possible. Inevitably, those who have money and influence struggle more successfully than those who do not. Children who grow up in the slums can see this. They know that America contains failures as well as successes, jobs which pay desperately low wages as well as jobs which pay extremely good ones, styles of life which are miserable as well as styles which are comfortable. Unless they have both unusual faith and unusual talent, they know that their future is, at best, one of comparative failure. It is this comparison, far more than absolute deprivation, which underlies the sickness of today's slums. It is this comparison with the rest of America which makes jobs and living standards that seemed more than adequate a generation ago seem intolerable today. (It is no accident that the "poverty line" shifts from one generation to another. As a rule of thumb, we can predict that any family which makes less than half the national average will feel poor, and will be defined as poor by liberal economists.)
This comparative standard must also be kept in mind when evaluating programs for upgrading slum schools. A man's employment prospects are not improved by teaching him ten percent more if, at the same time, all his neighbors are being taught twenty percent more. Increasing a school's budget by fifty percent will not equalize the opportunities open to its students if, at the same time, competing schools also get 50 or even 100 percent more money.
II -The bureaucracy problem
It would be politically difficult to equalize opportunity between the slums and the suburbs under the best of circumstances. But not even the better financed slum schools (e.g. those in Harlem, on which more money is spent than in most suburbs outside the New York area) achieve results comparable to suburban systems. This in turn makes it even more difficult to raise the necessary money than it would otherwise be. If an extra $20 billion a year would bring slum children up to the academic level of their suburban rivals, some legislators would support the expenditure out of idealism. But many legislators feel - and not without reason - that even if they gave the schools an unlimited budget, the children of the slums would continue to grow up both personally and academically crippled.
These fears may be exaggerated. They certainly ought to be tested empirically before being accepted at face value. The Ford Foundation, for example, instead of sprinkling money around in dozens of different projects and places, ought to try raising school expenditures in one slum area to, say, double the level in nearby suburbs just to see what would happen. It would, of course, take many years to tell. Children who were more than two or three when the experiment began would already have been scarred, often hopelessly, by the existing system. It would be a generation before the impact of the extra money on today's infants could be fully weighed. But if it turned out that an extra $100 million a year made a dramatic difference in, say, the slums of Washington, D. C., it would become very much easier to get comparable sums from taxpayers in other areas.
Unfortunately, an extra $100 million might not make a dramatic difference in Washington - or in most other places either. Much that has been said and written about slum schools, not only in Washington but in places where race is not an issue, suggests that inadequate funds are only part of their problem. They also have the wrong motives and objectives. Some slum schools seem to be less educational than penal institutions. Their function is more to pacify the young' than to teach them. They are ruled by fear, not love, infected by boredom, not curiosity. Such schools should not be given more money; they should be closed.
The roots of the problem go very deep. At times the problem seems to be public control itself. Because the slum school is public, it is accountable to the taxpayer. As in every other public enterprise, this kind of minute accountability to publicity-hungry elected officials leads to timidity among the employees. Public control puts a premium not on achieving a few spectacular successes but on avoiding any spectacular failures. In this respect there is not much difference between education and other fields of public endeavor. Nevertheless, public control over education has achieved a sanctity and respectability which public control over other enterprises has never mustered. Conversely, the ideologists of private enterprise have, with the conspicuous exception of Milton Friedman, been comparatively slow to apply their arguments in behalf of private schools.
Yet public control is not a sufficient explanation of the problems of the slum school, for public control seems to have worked quite well in some suburbs and small towns. The problem seems to be that in the slums public control has been linked to inadequate funds for performing the job assigned. Slum schools have found it difficult to get extra money even when there was reason to believe that the marginal return on this money would be very good. Educators might argue, for example, that doubling expenditures in the slums would treble results. But since we have no good way to measure this, skeptical legislators have been slow to provide extra money. As a result, pay scales in big city school systems have been too low to compete with most other jobs requiring equivalent training, skill, and masochism. And so, in turn, many slum teachers and administrators have comparatively little competence, confidence or commitment.
In city after city this has led to the creation of a system of education whose first axiom is that everyone, on every level, is incompetent and irresponsible. From this axiom comes the corollary that everyone must be carefully watched by a superior. The school board has no faith in the central administration, the central administration has no faith in the principals, the principals have no faith in the teachers, and the teachers have no faith in the students. Decision-making is constantly centralized into as few hands as possible rather than being decentralized into as many hands as possible, in the hope of reducing errors to a minimum. Of course such a system also reduces individual initiative to a minimum, but that is a price which a publicly-controlled bureaucracy, whose aim is not profits but survival, usually seems willing to pay. In such a system it seems natural not to give the principal of a school control over his budget, not to give teachers control over their syllabus, and not to give the students control over anything. Distrust is the order of the day, symbolized by the elaborate accounting system, the endless forms to be filled out for the central office, the time clocks and the two-way radios for monitoring classrooms from the front office, the constant tests and elaborate regulations for students.
In such a system everyone gets along by going along with the man over him. Most come to see themselves as play actors. The student tries to dope out what the teacher wants, and gives it to him. Usually all he wants is a reasonable amount of quiet in class and some appearance of docility in doing assignments. The teachers, in turn, try to figure out what the principal wants. That usually means filing grades and attendance records promptly, keeping trouble over discipline to a minimum, and avoiding complaints from parents or students. The principal, in turn, tries to keep the central administration happy (and the administration tries to keep the school board happy) by not sticking his neck out and by damping down "trouble" before it gets "out of hand."
Organizational sclerosis of this kind is extremely difficult to cure. For obvious reasons innovation from the bottom up becomes impossible and unthinkable. But even innovation from the top down is difficult. It is easy to get people to go through the form of change, but it is almost impossible to get them to really change, because they are frozen into defensive postures based on years of stand-pattism. If the principal tells the teachers he wants them to revamp the curriculum, they immediately begin looking to him - not to their students in the classroom - for cues and clues about what kinds of changes to propose. If the teachers tell the students to think for themselves, the students interpret this as just another move by the teacher to complicate "the game," another frustration in their efforts to "give the teacher what he wants." If the school board tries raising salaries in order to attract new kinds of teachers, it must still assign them to the same old schools, where they are still treated like filing clerks. So the more imaginative and dedicated teachers leave after a year or two for other schools - often in suburbia - which treat them better. In such circumstances more money may just mean more of the same.
A business which becomes afflicted with this kind of disease either goes bankrupt or else creates a monopoly or cartel to protect itself from more dynamic competition. The same is true of school systems. Were it not for their monopoly on educational opportunities for the poor, most big city school systems would probably go out of business. If, for example, the poor were simply given the money that is now spent on their children's education in public schools, and were told they could spend this money in private institutions, private schools would begin to spring up to serve slum children. In due course such schools would probably enroll the great majority of these children. The case of the parochial schools illustrates this point. These schools are seldom really free, but many parents, including some non-Catholics, make considerable sacrifices to send their children to them. In some cases, of course, this is a matter of religious faith. But if one asks parents why they prefer the parochial schools, the answer is often that they think the schooling itself is better than what the public schools in their area offer. Evidence collected by Peter Rossi and Andrew Greeley of the National Opinion Research Center suggests that the parochial schools usually do do more for their students than their public competitors, at least judging by the records of their alumni. This seems to be so despite the fact that they have less money, pay lower salaries to lay teachers, have larger classes, older buildings, and fewer amenities of every sort.
There is, of course, considerable reluctance among non-Catholics (and also among anti-clerical Catholics) to admit that the parochial schools might be doing something of value. Most non-Catholics, including myself, have an instinctive distrust of the Church. We have readily accepted the proposition that its schools were "divisive," despite research evidence which shows that aside from their religious practices parochial school graduates have about the same habits and values as Catholics who attend public schools. A similar prejudice clouds efforts to discuss what have traditionally been called "private" schools. Educators have taught us to use "public" as a synonym for, “democratic" or just plain "good", and to associate "private" with elitist" and "inequality." In part this is because when we think of a “public" school we conjure up a small-town or suburban school which is responsible and responsive to those whom it serves; a "private" school, on the other hand, is imagined as a posh country club for the sons of the rich. Yet using this kind of language to describe the "public" schools of Harlem surely obscures as much as it reveals. The Harlem schools are hardly more responsible or responsive to those whom they nominally serve than the typical "private" school. They are "public" only in the legal sense that the Post Office, for example, is "public", i.e., they are tax supported, open to all, ultimately answerable to public officials who have almost no interest in them. Conversely, while it is true that "private" schools have in the past catered mainly to the well-off, this seems to reflect economic necessity more than social prejudice. If the poor were given as much money to spend on education as the rich, there is every reason to assume that the private sector would expand to accommodate them. Indeed, if we were to judge schools by their willingness to subsidize the poor, we would have to say that private schools have shown more interest in the poor than public ones. Has any suburban board of education used its own money to provide scholarships for slum children? Most refuse to admit such children even if their way is paid. Many private boards of trustees, on the other hand, have made such efforts, albeit on a small scale.
Private control has several advantages in a school which serves slum children. To begin with, it makes it possible to attack the problem in manageable bites. It is inconceivable that a big city school system can be reformed all at once. Failing that, however, it may be impossible to reform it at all. If, for example, the system is geared to docile teachers who do not want and cannot handle responsibility, how is it to accommodate the enterprising minority who have ideas of their own and want freedom to try them out? The superintendent cannot alter the whole system to deal with a handful of such teachers, even if be wants to. But if be does not alter the system, the better teachers will usually leave - or not come in the first place. Somehow the system must be broken up so that its parts can develop at different paces, in different styles, and even in different directions. Little cells of excellence must be nourished, gradually adding to their own number and excitement. Unusual talent must not be spread so thin over the whole system that no single place achieves the critical mass needed to sustain a chain reaction. Yet this is just what a conventional, centrally controlled system tends to do, for in such a system "special treatment" for a particular school is quickly defined as "favoritism." (This attitude is illustrated in the response of big cities to the offer of federal funds under the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Almost nobody wants to concentrate this money in a few places to create really good schools; everyone wants to spread it across the whole system.)
A second virtue of private schools is that they get away from the increasingly irrelevant tradition of neighborhood schools. Every psychologist and sociologist now recognizes that what children learn formally from their teachers is only a small fraction of their overall education. What they learn informally from their classmates is equally or more important. For this reason it is extremely important to expose slum children to classmates who teach them things which will be an asset rather than a liability as they grow older. A school which draws only from the slum itself will not provide this kind of stimulus. Instead, ways must be found to mix slum children with racially and economically different classmates.
In principle, of course, this kind of ethnic and economic mixing ought to be easier within a public system than a private one. But this may not be so in practice. In a publicly controlled system every school is required to follow essentially the same educational policies and practices as every other one. This means that the differences between schools derive largely if not exclusively from the differences in their student bodies. (Ability to hold good administrators and teachers seems to depend largely on this, for example.) So long as the student “mix" is decisive, middle-class parents are understandably reluctant to send their children to school with substantial numbers of lowerclass children. White parents feel the same way about schools with large numbers of Negro children. But if the traditions and distinctive identity of a school depend not on the character of the student body but on the special objectives and methods of the staff, middle-class parents who approve of these objectives and methods will often send their children despite the presence of poorer classmates. This is clearest, perhaps, in the parochial schools. It might also be possible in non-sectarian private schools, if these had the money to give poor children scholarships, or if outside groups provided such scholarships to large numbers of children.
Getting rid of the neighborhood school, whether by creating city-wide public schools or private ones, could also have the virtue of providing the poor with a real choice about the kinds of schools their children attend. At present, the neighborhood school must try to be all things to all people in its area. Anything daring is bound to displease somebody, and so must be avoided. But if schools could simply tell those who disliked their methods to look elsewhere, and could look all over a large city for a clientele which wanted a particular brand of education, there would be a better chance both for innovation in the schools and for satisfying the diverse needs of different students. It should be possible, for example, for poor people to send their children to a school which segregates the sexes, or employs the Montessorri method, or teaches reading phonetically, or emulates the Summerhill approach. Not everyone wants such things, but some do, and they should be able to get them. Given the present outlook of the men who control big city public schools, the only way to make these choices available is probably in the private sector.
In principle there are two ways to develop a larger measure of private initiative and room for maneuver in educating the poor. One would be to provide tuition grants to children who opted out of the public-controlled schools, equal to what would be spent on them if they stayed in. These tuition grants could be used to pay the bills in private schools. There are not, of course, enough private schools today to handle all the potential applicants from the slums, but more would spring up if money were available. But even without tuition grants it should be possible to create much more diversity and decentralization in the schools. School boards could, for example, contract with various groups to manage particular schools in their own system.
A university might be given contract to run a model school system in the slums, as suggested by the Panel on Educational Research and Development of the President's Science Advisory Committee. This is apparently to be tried in New York.
A local business group might also take over the management of a school. (If Litton Industries can run a job Corps camp, it can surely run a school.)
A group of teachers might incorporate itself to manage a school on contract from the citywide board. This could be done at no expense within the present system, using present personnel and facilities, and it might have appreciable advantages. Suppose, for example, that the New York City Board of Education were to rent its facilities to their present staffs and provide them with a management contract subject to annual review. Ultimate control over the school could be vested in the teachers, who would hire administrators. Hiring and firing teachers, budget-making, programming and so forth would all be decided on the spot. If the school did a poor job - which some surely would - the contract could be terminated. A group of parents, working through an elected board, might also take over a school. This alternative, which should be especially appealing to the New Left and to the prophets of "community action," is perhaps better described as a new kind of public control than as private control. In effect, it would mean replacing responsibility to the taxpayer-stockholder with responsibility to the consumer - a kind of educational cooperative.
All these alternatives aim at a radical decentralization of both power and responsibility. All would liberate the schools from the dead hand of central administration, from minute accountability to the public for every penny, every minute, and every word. They all recognize that so far as the slum child is concerned, the present system of "socialized education" has failed, and that some kind of new departure, either "capitalist" or "syndicalist," is needed.
Either tuition grants or management contracts to private organizations would, of course, "destroy the public school system as we know it." When one thinks of the remarkable past achievements of public education in America, this may seem a foolish step. But we must not allow the memory of past achievements to blind us to present failures. Nor should we allow the rhetoric of public school men to obscure the issue. It is natural for public servants to complain about private competition, just as private business complains about public competition. But if the terms of the competition are reasonable, there is every reason to suppose that it is healthy. Without it, both public and private enterprises have a way of ossifying. And if, as some fear, the public schools could not survive in open competition with private ones, then perhaps they should not survive.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Women's Rights Bill
How Pakistan's rape reform ran aground
By Barbara Plett
BBC News, Islamabad
Pakistan's government has put a controversial women's rights bill on hold, throwing into turmoil efforts to reform hardline Islamic laws on rape.
Secular parties are furious after the draft law was amended to appease Pakistan's ultra-conservative Islamic parties.
Now the authorities are scrambling to reach a broader consensus before trying for a fourth time to present the bill in parliament.
The imbroglio has been branded by human rights activists as a disaster for Pakistani women.
It is also seen as further evidence that the government of President Gen Pervez Musharraf remains dependent on the Islamists, despite his claims of promoting an Islam of "enlightened moderation".
Un-reported rapes
In Pakistan, rape is dealt with under Islamic laws known as the Hudood Ordinances. These criminalise all sex outside marriage.
So, under Hudood, if a rape victim fails to present four male witnesses to the crime, she herself could face punishment.
This has made it almost impossible to prosecute rape cases.
According to the country's independent Human Rights Commission, a woman is raped every two hours and gang-raped every eight hours in Pakistan.
These figures are probably an under-estimation as many rapes are not reported.
Government panic
Until his ruling party caved in, President Musharraf had seemed determined to reform the Hudood Ordinances.
Despite vociferous objections from the Islamic parties - an alliance known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) - the bill had been approved by a parliamentary committee with the support of the main secular opposition Pakistan People's Party (PPP).
The committee proposed removing rape from religious law and putting it instead in the secular penal code, where normal rules of evidence would apply.
The MMA cried foul, threatening to resign en masse from parliament if the bill was passed.
And in a panic the government set up an extra-parliamentary committee of religious scholars to pacify the Islamists.
This said that rape should fall under both religious and secular law. It introduced a new, very broadly defined, category of "lewdness" into the penal code, and reinstated a clause giving the Hudood Ordinances pre-eminence over any law with which they might come into conflict.
Political isolation
Liberal political parties, civil and human rights activists and lawyers said these changes essentially eviscerated the reform, and allowed powerful religious lobbies to manipulate what is seen as a weak judicial system.
They also denounced the government for bypassing parliamentary procedures.
Gen Musharraf must have known any changes to the Hudood Ordinances would raise the ire of the Islamists. Why then did his government collapse so rapidly before them?
Commentators suggest two reasons.
One is that his ruling party is divided, between those who want to keep a tacit alliance with the MMA, and those willing to push for a reform agenda in alliance with the opposition PPP, led by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
The other is that rarely have President Musharraf and his military-led regime been so isolated.
They are now opposed by all save one of the secular and nationalist parties, with even the Islamists threatening street protests.
Alliance intact
The president has been condemned at home for using excessive force against nationalist rebels in the restive province of Balochistan, and abroad for striking a peace deal with pro-Taleban tribesmen in the tribal area of North Waziristan.
Assailed on all sides, the president's only certain support is the military - and the Pakistani army is not prepared to take on the Islamists over women's rights.
So after a week of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary shenanigans, the alliance of military and mullah that has governed Pakistan for the last seven years appears shaken but intact.
Women remain at the mercy of fundamentalist legislation.
And Gen Musharraf's message of "enlightened moderation" seems intended more for foreign than local consumption.
By Barbara Plett
BBC News, Islamabad
Pakistan's government has put a controversial women's rights bill on hold, throwing into turmoil efforts to reform hardline Islamic laws on rape.
Secular parties are furious after the draft law was amended to appease Pakistan's ultra-conservative Islamic parties.
Now the authorities are scrambling to reach a broader consensus before trying for a fourth time to present the bill in parliament.
The imbroglio has been branded by human rights activists as a disaster for Pakistani women.
It is also seen as further evidence that the government of President Gen Pervez Musharraf remains dependent on the Islamists, despite his claims of promoting an Islam of "enlightened moderation".
Un-reported rapes
In Pakistan, rape is dealt with under Islamic laws known as the Hudood Ordinances. These criminalise all sex outside marriage.
So, under Hudood, if a rape victim fails to present four male witnesses to the crime, she herself could face punishment.
This has made it almost impossible to prosecute rape cases.
According to the country's independent Human Rights Commission, a woman is raped every two hours and gang-raped every eight hours in Pakistan.
These figures are probably an under-estimation as many rapes are not reported.
Government panic
Until his ruling party caved in, President Musharraf had seemed determined to reform the Hudood Ordinances.
Despite vociferous objections from the Islamic parties - an alliance known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) - the bill had been approved by a parliamentary committee with the support of the main secular opposition Pakistan People's Party (PPP).
The committee proposed removing rape from religious law and putting it instead in the secular penal code, where normal rules of evidence would apply.
The MMA cried foul, threatening to resign en masse from parliament if the bill was passed.
And in a panic the government set up an extra-parliamentary committee of religious scholars to pacify the Islamists.
This said that rape should fall under both religious and secular law. It introduced a new, very broadly defined, category of "lewdness" into the penal code, and reinstated a clause giving the Hudood Ordinances pre-eminence over any law with which they might come into conflict.
Political isolation
Liberal political parties, civil and human rights activists and lawyers said these changes essentially eviscerated the reform, and allowed powerful religious lobbies to manipulate what is seen as a weak judicial system.
They also denounced the government for bypassing parliamentary procedures.
Gen Musharraf must have known any changes to the Hudood Ordinances would raise the ire of the Islamists. Why then did his government collapse so rapidly before them?
Commentators suggest two reasons.
One is that his ruling party is divided, between those who want to keep a tacit alliance with the MMA, and those willing to push for a reform agenda in alliance with the opposition PPP, led by former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
The other is that rarely have President Musharraf and his military-led regime been so isolated.
They are now opposed by all save one of the secular and nationalist parties, with even the Islamists threatening street protests.
Alliance intact
The president has been condemned at home for using excessive force against nationalist rebels in the restive province of Balochistan, and abroad for striking a peace deal with pro-Taleban tribesmen in the tribal area of North Waziristan.
Assailed on all sides, the president's only certain support is the military - and the Pakistani army is not prepared to take on the Islamists over women's rights.
So after a week of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary shenanigans, the alliance of military and mullah that has governed Pakistan for the last seven years appears shaken but intact.
Women remain at the mercy of fundamentalist legislation.
And Gen Musharraf's message of "enlightened moderation" seems intended more for foreign than local consumption.
Muslim Rage
September 14, 2006
Muslim Leaders Assail Pope’s Speech on Islam
By IAN FISHER
ROME, Sept. 14 — As Pope Benedict XVI arrived back home from Germany, Muslim leaders strongly criticized a speech he gave on his trip that used unflattering language about Islam and violence.
Some of the strongest words came from Turkey, possibly putting in jeopardy Benedict’s scheduled visit there in November.
“I do not think any good will come from the visit to the Muslim world of a person who has such ideas about Islam’s prophet,” Ali Bardakoglu, a cleric who is head of the Turkish government’s directorate of religious affairs, said in a television interview there. “He should first of all replace the grudge in his heart with moral values and respect for the other.”
Muslim leaders in Pakistan, Morocco and Kuwait, in addition to those in Germany and France, also criticized the pope’s remarks, with many demanding an apology or clarification. The extent of any anger about the speech may become clearer on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer in which grievances are often vented publicly.
The Vatican did not respond today, as the pope returned from his six-day trip to his homeland, Germany, to the criticism of his speech. On Tuesday, Benedict delivered a major address — which some church experts say was a defining speech of his pontificate — saying that the West, and specifically Europe, had become so beholden to reason that it had closed God out of public life, science and academia.
But the pope began this speech at Regensburg University with what he conceded were “brusque” words about Islam: He quoted a 14th Century Byzantine emperor as saying, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
Benedict also used the word “jihad,” or holy war, saying that violence was contrary to God’s nature and to reason. But, at the end of a speech that did not otherwise mention Islam, he also said that reason could be the basis for “that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”
The pope did not intend to insult Islam, his spokesman said on Tuesday. But many experts on Islam warned that Benedict ran the risk of offense in using such strong language, with tensions between religions so high.
And today, criticism began pouring the pope’s way. The 79-year-old Benedict has taken a more skeptical, hard-nosed approach to Islam than did his predecessor, John Paul II, who died in April 2005.
“I don’t think the church should point a finger at extremist activities in other religions, Aiman Mazyek, president of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, told the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, recalling the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Vatican’s relations with Nazi Germany.
The French Council for the Muslim Religion demanded that Benedict “clarify” his remarks. “We hope that the Church will very quickly give us its opinion and clarify its position so that it does not confuse Islam, which is a revealed religion, with Islamism, which is not a religion but a political ideology,” Dalil Boubakeur, the council’s president, told Agence France-Presse.
In Kuwait, the leader of the Islamic Nation Party, Haken al-Mutairi, demanded an apology for what he called “unaccustomed and unprecedented” remarks.
“I call on all Arab and Islamic states to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican and expel those from the Vatican until the pope says he is sorry for the wrong done to the prophet and to Islam, which preaches peace, tolerance, justice and equality,” Mr. Mutairi told Agence France-Presse.
In Pakistan, Muslim leaders and scholars said that Benedict’s words widened the gap between Islam and Christianity, and risked what one official called greater “disharmony.”
“The pope’s statement is highly irresponsible,” said another ranking Muslim, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, an Islamic scholar. “The concept of jihad is not to spread Islam with sword.”
The criticism from the Turkish official was especially strong, and carries with it particular embarrassment if Benedict is forced to cancel or delay his visit to Turkey. Many Turks are already critical of Benedict, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had in 2004 opposed Turkey’s entry into the European Union.
The official, Mr. Bardakoglu, demanded an apology, saying that the remarks “reflect the hatred in his heart. It is a statement full of enmity and grudge.”
In Morocco, the newspaper Aujourd’hui questioned the good faith of Benedict’s call for a real dialogue between religions.
“Pope Benedict XVI has a strange approach to the dialogue between religions,” the paper wrote in an editorial. “He is being provocative.”
The paper also drew a comparison between the pope’s remarks and the outcry in the Muslim world over unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Muhammadpublished around Europe beginning last year.
“The global outcry over the calamitous cartoons have only just died down and now the pontiff, in all his holiness, is launching an attack against Islam,” the newspaper wrote.
September 15, 2006
Pope Faces Crisis as Muslim Outcry Grows
By IAN FISHER
ROME, Sept. 15 — Pope Benedict XVI came under increasing critical fire t0day over comments he made about Islam, as Muslim leaders around the world angrily accused him of dividing religions and demanded an apology.
In Britain, Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Indonesia, Muslim leaders registered their protest. The Parliament in Pakistan passed a resolution against the pope’s statements, and the government later summoned the Vatican envoy to express official displeasure. In Lebanon, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the most senior Shiite cleric, demanded “a personal apology — not through his envoys.”
And emotion spilled over in Turkey, where Benedict has scheduled a visit in November, as a top official in the Islamic-rooted ruling party said that the pope is “going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini.”
“He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages,” the official, Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s government, was quoted on the state-owned Anatolia news agency. “It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades.”
Reaction to the pope’s remarks — in which he quoted a description of Islam in the 14th century as “evil and inhuman” — has presented Benedict with the first full-blown crisis of his year-and-a-half papacy. Already some in Turkey have questioned whether he should make the visit, which would be the pope’s first trip to a Muslim country. Many Muslims are also comparing his comments with the unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad which stoked deep Muslim anger earlier this year.
But unlike the cartoons crisis, the reaction has been verbal rather than violent. In Gaza, a grenade was thrown today at one of the gates of the Roman Orthodox church, though no one claimed responsibility and it was unclear if the incident was related to the pope’s statements.
The Vatican released no official comment today. On Thursday, as Benedict returned from a six-day trip to Germany, the pope’s chief spokesman said that he had not intended to “offend the sensibility of Muslim believers.”
Meantime, other top Vatican officials also sought to tamp down the furor.
“I am convinced the pope did not mean to assume a position against Islam,” a leading German cardinal, Walter Kasper, told the Italian daily newspaper, La Repubblica.
Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, a French prelate with experience in the Islamic world, was appointed today as the Vatican’s new foreign minister. He told Agence France-Presse: “The dialogue between different civilizations, cultures and religions — which nobody can hide from — will be one of the great questions which I will tackle in my new job.”
In a major speech at Regensburg University, where Benedict had taught theology, the pope delivered a long, scholarly address on reason and faith in the West. But he began his speech by recounting a conversation between the 14th century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel Paleologos II, and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.
“The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war,” the pope said. “He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached. ’ ’’
While making clear he was quoting someone else, Benedict he did not say whether he agreed or disagreed with the statement.
He also briefly discussed the Islamic concept of “jihad,” which he defined as “holy war,” and said that violence in the name of religion is contrary to God’s nature and to reason.
But he also suggested reason as the basis for “that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”
Benedict, a respected theologian, is said to write many speeches himself, and some commentators in the Italian press speculated that the Vatican would be forced into a more stringent review of his statements in the future.
The controversy came as a new top Vatican hierarchy is being installed. Clearly its first job will be to contain the controversy. In addition to appointing Archbishop Mamberti as foreign minister, the pope installed a new secretary of state, the Vatican’s highest position after the pope. He is Cardinal Tarcisco Bertone, 71, an Italian and longtime colleague of the pope’s.
Amid the angry reaction, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who met with the pope on his trip there, defended his speech.
“Whoever criticizes the Pope misunderstood the aim of his speech,” she was quoted as saying by the Bild newspaper. “It was an invitation to dialogue between religions and the Pope expressly spoke in favor of this dialogue, which is something I also support and consider urgent and necessary.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad for this article.
Muslim Leaders Assail Pope’s Speech on Islam
By IAN FISHER
ROME, Sept. 14 — As Pope Benedict XVI arrived back home from Germany, Muslim leaders strongly criticized a speech he gave on his trip that used unflattering language about Islam and violence.
Some of the strongest words came from Turkey, possibly putting in jeopardy Benedict’s scheduled visit there in November.
“I do not think any good will come from the visit to the Muslim world of a person who has such ideas about Islam’s prophet,” Ali Bardakoglu, a cleric who is head of the Turkish government’s directorate of religious affairs, said in a television interview there. “He should first of all replace the grudge in his heart with moral values and respect for the other.”
Muslim leaders in Pakistan, Morocco and Kuwait, in addition to those in Germany and France, also criticized the pope’s remarks, with many demanding an apology or clarification. The extent of any anger about the speech may become clearer on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer in which grievances are often vented publicly.
The Vatican did not respond today, as the pope returned from his six-day trip to his homeland, Germany, to the criticism of his speech. On Tuesday, Benedict delivered a major address — which some church experts say was a defining speech of his pontificate — saying that the West, and specifically Europe, had become so beholden to reason that it had closed God out of public life, science and academia.
But the pope began this speech at Regensburg University with what he conceded were “brusque” words about Islam: He quoted a 14th Century Byzantine emperor as saying, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
Benedict also used the word “jihad,” or holy war, saying that violence was contrary to God’s nature and to reason. But, at the end of a speech that did not otherwise mention Islam, he also said that reason could be the basis for “that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”
The pope did not intend to insult Islam, his spokesman said on Tuesday. But many experts on Islam warned that Benedict ran the risk of offense in using such strong language, with tensions between religions so high.
And today, criticism began pouring the pope’s way. The 79-year-old Benedict has taken a more skeptical, hard-nosed approach to Islam than did his predecessor, John Paul II, who died in April 2005.
“I don’t think the church should point a finger at extremist activities in other religions, Aiman Mazyek, president of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, told the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, recalling the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Vatican’s relations with Nazi Germany.
The French Council for the Muslim Religion demanded that Benedict “clarify” his remarks. “We hope that the Church will very quickly give us its opinion and clarify its position so that it does not confuse Islam, which is a revealed religion, with Islamism, which is not a religion but a political ideology,” Dalil Boubakeur, the council’s president, told Agence France-Presse.
In Kuwait, the leader of the Islamic Nation Party, Haken al-Mutairi, demanded an apology for what he called “unaccustomed and unprecedented” remarks.
“I call on all Arab and Islamic states to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican and expel those from the Vatican until the pope says he is sorry for the wrong done to the prophet and to Islam, which preaches peace, tolerance, justice and equality,” Mr. Mutairi told Agence France-Presse.
In Pakistan, Muslim leaders and scholars said that Benedict’s words widened the gap between Islam and Christianity, and risked what one official called greater “disharmony.”
“The pope’s statement is highly irresponsible,” said another ranking Muslim, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, an Islamic scholar. “The concept of jihad is not to spread Islam with sword.”
The criticism from the Turkish official was especially strong, and carries with it particular embarrassment if Benedict is forced to cancel or delay his visit to Turkey. Many Turks are already critical of Benedict, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had in 2004 opposed Turkey’s entry into the European Union.
The official, Mr. Bardakoglu, demanded an apology, saying that the remarks “reflect the hatred in his heart. It is a statement full of enmity and grudge.”
In Morocco, the newspaper Aujourd’hui questioned the good faith of Benedict’s call for a real dialogue between religions.
“Pope Benedict XVI has a strange approach to the dialogue between religions,” the paper wrote in an editorial. “He is being provocative.”
The paper also drew a comparison between the pope’s remarks and the outcry in the Muslim world over unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Muhammadpublished around Europe beginning last year.
“The global outcry over the calamitous cartoons have only just died down and now the pontiff, in all his holiness, is launching an attack against Islam,” the newspaper wrote.
September 15, 2006
Pope Faces Crisis as Muslim Outcry Grows
By IAN FISHER
ROME, Sept. 15 — Pope Benedict XVI came under increasing critical fire t0day over comments he made about Islam, as Muslim leaders around the world angrily accused him of dividing religions and demanded an apology.
In Britain, Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Indonesia, Muslim leaders registered their protest. The Parliament in Pakistan passed a resolution against the pope’s statements, and the government later summoned the Vatican envoy to express official displeasure. In Lebanon, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the most senior Shiite cleric, demanded “a personal apology — not through his envoys.”
And emotion spilled over in Turkey, where Benedict has scheduled a visit in November, as a top official in the Islamic-rooted ruling party said that the pope is “going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini.”
“He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages,” the official, Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s government, was quoted on the state-owned Anatolia news agency. “It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades.”
Reaction to the pope’s remarks — in which he quoted a description of Islam in the 14th century as “evil and inhuman” — has presented Benedict with the first full-blown crisis of his year-and-a-half papacy. Already some in Turkey have questioned whether he should make the visit, which would be the pope’s first trip to a Muslim country. Many Muslims are also comparing his comments with the unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad which stoked deep Muslim anger earlier this year.
But unlike the cartoons crisis, the reaction has been verbal rather than violent. In Gaza, a grenade was thrown today at one of the gates of the Roman Orthodox church, though no one claimed responsibility and it was unclear if the incident was related to the pope’s statements.
The Vatican released no official comment today. On Thursday, as Benedict returned from a six-day trip to Germany, the pope’s chief spokesman said that he had not intended to “offend the sensibility of Muslim believers.”
Meantime, other top Vatican officials also sought to tamp down the furor.
“I am convinced the pope did not mean to assume a position against Islam,” a leading German cardinal, Walter Kasper, told the Italian daily newspaper, La Repubblica.
Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, a French prelate with experience in the Islamic world, was appointed today as the Vatican’s new foreign minister. He told Agence France-Presse: “The dialogue between different civilizations, cultures and religions — which nobody can hide from — will be one of the great questions which I will tackle in my new job.”
In a major speech at Regensburg University, where Benedict had taught theology, the pope delivered a long, scholarly address on reason and faith in the West. But he began his speech by recounting a conversation between the 14th century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel Paleologos II, and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.
“The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war,” the pope said. “He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached. ’ ’’
While making clear he was quoting someone else, Benedict he did not say whether he agreed or disagreed with the statement.
He also briefly discussed the Islamic concept of “jihad,” which he defined as “holy war,” and said that violence in the name of religion is contrary to God’s nature and to reason.
But he also suggested reason as the basis for “that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”
Benedict, a respected theologian, is said to write many speeches himself, and some commentators in the Italian press speculated that the Vatican would be forced into a more stringent review of his statements in the future.
The controversy came as a new top Vatican hierarchy is being installed. Clearly its first job will be to contain the controversy. In addition to appointing Archbishop Mamberti as foreign minister, the pope installed a new secretary of state, the Vatican’s highest position after the pope. He is Cardinal Tarcisco Bertone, 71, an Italian and longtime colleague of the pope’s.
Amid the angry reaction, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who met with the pope on his trip there, defended his speech.
“Whoever criticizes the Pope misunderstood the aim of his speech,” she was quoted as saying by the Bild newspaper. “It was an invitation to dialogue between religions and the Pope expressly spoke in favor of this dialogue, which is something I also support and consider urgent and necessary.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad for this article.
Baghdad Bodies
September 14, 2006
On Another Grim Day, Bodies Lie Everywhere in Baghdad
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Sept. 13 — Nearly 90 Iraqis were killed or found dead here on Tuesday and Wednesday, an Interior Ministry official said, making for a particularly grim day even amid the intense sectarian violence.
At least 60 bodies were found throughout Baghdad between 6 a.m. Tuesday and 6 a.m. Wednesday, the ministry official said. Forty victims were unknown; 20 were identified.
Nearly all were shot in the head, had clear signs of torture, or were blindfolded, bound or gagged, and most were discovered in neighborhoods of western Baghdad with heavy Sunni Arab populations, he said. The other deaths reported by the ministry were in bombings and other attacks on Wednesday.
American military officials, who have been more aggressive in challenging body counts if they consider them inaccurate, disputed the number found, saying the actual number was roughly half what the ministry had reported.
According to the Baghdad morgue, whose statistics often prove to be higher than figures reported by news services or the Interior Ministry, the bodies of 1,535 victims of violent deaths, an average of 50 a day, were received in August. In July, the average was 60 a day. A recent study of civilian deaths by the United Nations found that by June, Iraqis across the country were being killed at a rate of more than 100 a day.
As the Iraqi police gathered up the bodies, several car bombs rocked Baghdad, killing or wounding dozens more. Among the attacks was a bomb that detonated shortly after 9 a.m. in southern Baghdad, killing 15 people, including 7 Iraqi police officers, and wounding 25 police officers and civilians, an American military spokeswoman said.
The Interior Ministry also said a bomb planted in an unattended car near a police station in eastern Baghdad exploded about 11:30 a.m., killing eight policemen and wounding 19 civilians.
The United States military also said two American soldiers had been killed. One died Monday from wounds sustained in fighting in Anbar Province, the largely insurgent-controlled region west of Baghdad. Another was killed Tuesday south of Baghdad when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.
In the capital’s heavily fortified Green Zone, a prosecutor in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein demanded Wednesday that the judge be removed for showing bias toward the former dictator and for letting him harangue witnesses.
Mr. Hussein is on trial for his role in the so-called Anfal military campaign in 1988 against Kurdish villages in northeastern Iraq. He and his co-defendants are accused of genocide in the killing at least 50,000 Kurds, including many in chemical weapon strikes.
He was tried earlier this year in the killing of 148 men and boys in 1982 in a Shiite village, Dujail, but that verdict is not expected for another month or two.
During the court session on Tuesday, Mr. Hussein called the Kurdish witnesses who had described atrocities at the hands of Mr. Hussein’s military “agents of Iran and Zionism.” And he warned witnesses that he would “crush your heads,” according to an account by The Associated Press.
As the trial resumed Wednesday morning, a prosecutor, Munqith al-Faroon, accused the judge of letting “the defendants to go too far, with unacceptable expressions and words,” according to a pool report filed by a reporter for The Daily Telegraph of London. Mr. Faroon said the judge had allowed defendants to “treat the chamber as a political forum.”
The judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, who was a judge during Mr. Hussein’s rule, responded coolly, not raising his voice. “The judge coordinates and makes peace among the people in his presence,” he said.
The court heard a powerful and graphic account from Omer Othman Mohammed, who said he was a member of the Kurdish pesh merga militia who was caught in a chemical-weapon strike by Iraqi jets in April 1988 that left him badly burned from his chest to his legs.
“It was so fast, we were shocked,” Mr. Mohammed testified, according to The Daily Telegraph’s pool report. “The rockets did not explode, but they just broke. One hit close to me. When it broke, the chemical inside, it covered me. It was a liquid, not a gas. I was shocked. I was in pain.
“There was severe pain as if there was a high pressure on me or as if I was touching an electric current, or as if boiling water was being poured on my body. There are feelings you cannot describe to the people around you, even your loved ones.”
Mr. Mohammed said he got up after the attack and saw that pieces of the rockets had sliced through some of his comrades.
“I saw people without their heads, I saw legs and arms,” he said. “I saw parts of the body of my beloved friends. I called to a friend of mine and he came to me. I asked him for a mirror and asked him to bring me a first aid kit. I looked at my eyes and they were terribly red. I was suffering from terrible pain.”
Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Omar al-Neami contributed reporting.
On Another Grim Day, Bodies Lie Everywhere in Baghdad
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Sept. 13 — Nearly 90 Iraqis were killed or found dead here on Tuesday and Wednesday, an Interior Ministry official said, making for a particularly grim day even amid the intense sectarian violence.
At least 60 bodies were found throughout Baghdad between 6 a.m. Tuesday and 6 a.m. Wednesday, the ministry official said. Forty victims were unknown; 20 were identified.
Nearly all were shot in the head, had clear signs of torture, or were blindfolded, bound or gagged, and most were discovered in neighborhoods of western Baghdad with heavy Sunni Arab populations, he said. The other deaths reported by the ministry were in bombings and other attacks on Wednesday.
American military officials, who have been more aggressive in challenging body counts if they consider them inaccurate, disputed the number found, saying the actual number was roughly half what the ministry had reported.
According to the Baghdad morgue, whose statistics often prove to be higher than figures reported by news services or the Interior Ministry, the bodies of 1,535 victims of violent deaths, an average of 50 a day, were received in August. In July, the average was 60 a day. A recent study of civilian deaths by the United Nations found that by June, Iraqis across the country were being killed at a rate of more than 100 a day.
As the Iraqi police gathered up the bodies, several car bombs rocked Baghdad, killing or wounding dozens more. Among the attacks was a bomb that detonated shortly after 9 a.m. in southern Baghdad, killing 15 people, including 7 Iraqi police officers, and wounding 25 police officers and civilians, an American military spokeswoman said.
The Interior Ministry also said a bomb planted in an unattended car near a police station in eastern Baghdad exploded about 11:30 a.m., killing eight policemen and wounding 19 civilians.
The United States military also said two American soldiers had been killed. One died Monday from wounds sustained in fighting in Anbar Province, the largely insurgent-controlled region west of Baghdad. Another was killed Tuesday south of Baghdad when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.
In the capital’s heavily fortified Green Zone, a prosecutor in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein demanded Wednesday that the judge be removed for showing bias toward the former dictator and for letting him harangue witnesses.
Mr. Hussein is on trial for his role in the so-called Anfal military campaign in 1988 against Kurdish villages in northeastern Iraq. He and his co-defendants are accused of genocide in the killing at least 50,000 Kurds, including many in chemical weapon strikes.
He was tried earlier this year in the killing of 148 men and boys in 1982 in a Shiite village, Dujail, but that verdict is not expected for another month or two.
During the court session on Tuesday, Mr. Hussein called the Kurdish witnesses who had described atrocities at the hands of Mr. Hussein’s military “agents of Iran and Zionism.” And he warned witnesses that he would “crush your heads,” according to an account by The Associated Press.
As the trial resumed Wednesday morning, a prosecutor, Munqith al-Faroon, accused the judge of letting “the defendants to go too far, with unacceptable expressions and words,” according to a pool report filed by a reporter for The Daily Telegraph of London. Mr. Faroon said the judge had allowed defendants to “treat the chamber as a political forum.”
The judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, who was a judge during Mr. Hussein’s rule, responded coolly, not raising his voice. “The judge coordinates and makes peace among the people in his presence,” he said.
The court heard a powerful and graphic account from Omer Othman Mohammed, who said he was a member of the Kurdish pesh merga militia who was caught in a chemical-weapon strike by Iraqi jets in April 1988 that left him badly burned from his chest to his legs.
“It was so fast, we were shocked,” Mr. Mohammed testified, according to The Daily Telegraph’s pool report. “The rockets did not explode, but they just broke. One hit close to me. When it broke, the chemical inside, it covered me. It was a liquid, not a gas. I was shocked. I was in pain.
“There was severe pain as if there was a high pressure on me or as if I was touching an electric current, or as if boiling water was being poured on my body. There are feelings you cannot describe to the people around you, even your loved ones.”
Mr. Mohammed said he got up after the attack and saw that pieces of the rockets had sliced through some of his comrades.
“I saw people without their heads, I saw legs and arms,” he said. “I saw parts of the body of my beloved friends. I called to a friend of mine and he came to me. I asked him for a mirror and asked him to bring me a first aid kit. I looked at my eyes and they were terribly red. I was suffering from terrible pain.”
Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Omar al-Neami contributed reporting.
Robert Cooper, the Breaking of Nations
Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century
Robert Cooper
2003
The worst times in European history were in the fourteenth century, during and after the Hundred Years War, in the seventeenth century at the time of the Thirty Years War, and in the first half of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century may be worse than any of these.
The first two periods were times when order broke down, when church, state and other ties of obligation were losing their power to discipline men's aggression. In the fourteenth century, the old order of chivalry was fading; feudal ties, weakened in endless wars, were giving way to patriotism; and the Church was divided by France's creation of the Avignon Papacy. After the Hundred Years' War, bands of soldiers roamed the ruined landscape of France terrorizing the countryside.
In the seventeenth century, the Church was split by the new Protestant movements and the wars that followed were both wars between states and wars of religion. Bringing together the power of the state and the fanaticism of the faithful, these wars without limit and without mercy laid waste to central Europe. Social order all but collapsed. By some accounts, a third of the population of Germany died. Every ten years in a passion play, the citizens of the Bavarian town of Oberammergau still give thanks for their deliverance from the Swedes. For most countries outside Europe, too, the worst memories of history are of periods of disorder: the era of the warring states in China, for example. Golden ages are usually times of strong government.
The European crisis in the twentieth century showed that the opposite can also be true. The wars of twentieth-century Europe were the first great wars of industrial society, wars of machines as well as men; they were also wars of over-powerful states able to mobilize their societies as never before; and they were made more deadly by nationalism and ideology. In this multiple catastrophe, the single most important thing that went wrong was that technology overran political maturity. Those who started the First World War had expected it to resemble the short wars of their childhood, not understanding the capacity of an industrial age to deliver men and munitions endlessly to the front. For the remainder of that half-century the machinery of propaganda, control and murder was turned against domestic and foreign populations in Germany, the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Then, for a moment, it seemed as if the nuclear revolution might complete the triumph of technology over mankind; but somehow political wisdom returned and there was a pause in civilization's pursuit of self-destruction.
The new century risks being overrun by both anarchy and technology. The two great destroyers of history may reinforce each other. And there is enough materiel left over from previous centuries in the shape of national, ideological and religious fanaticisms to provide motives for the destruction.
Both the spread of terrorism and that of weapons of mass destruction point to a world in which Western governments are losing control. The spread of the technology of mass destruction represents a potentially massive redistribution of power away from the advanced industrial (and democratic) states towards smaller states that may be less stable and have less of a stake in an orderly world; or, more dramatically still, it may represent a redistribution of power away from the state itself and towards individuals, that is to say terrorists or criminals. If proliferation were to take place in this fashion it would not only be Western governments that would be losing control, but all those people who have an interest in an orderly world.
In the past, to be damaging an ideological movement had to be widespread to recruit enough support to take on authority. Probably there had to be genuine grievances behind it. Henceforth, comparatively small groups will be able to do the sort of damage which before only state armies or major revolutionary movements could achieve. A few fanatics with a 'dirty bomb' (one which sprays out radiological material) or biological weapons will be able to cause death on a scale not previously envisaged. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo's attempt to use anthrax in Tokyo failed, but sooner or later one of their successors will succeed somewhere in the world. A serious terrorist attack could be launched by perhaps sixty people, provided they were sufficiently committed, courageous and competent (or, alternatively, fanatical, foolhardy and fortunate). 0.000001 per cent of the population is enough. Emancipation, diversity, global communication - all the things that promise an age of riches and creativity - could also bring a nightmare in which states lose control of the means of violence and people lose control of their futures. Civilization and order rests on the control of violence: if it becomes uncontrollable there will be no order and no civilization.
The three essays in this collection are indirect reflections from different angles on this situation and on what can be done about it.
The first describes the state of the world and the state of the state, a decade after the end of the Cold War. The most obvious feature of this world is American power; but in the long run the most important facts may be the end of empire and the transformation of the state through globalization. The most hopeful feature is the emergence of the postmodern' system of security in Europe. And the most worrying is the encroachment of chaos on the civilized world - from around it and within it. Europe may be able to stop the approach of chaos through the Balkans or even from across the Mediterranean, but it may prove more difficult to deal with chaos in its own suburbs and declining industrial towns.
The descent into chaos will not happen quickly. There is still time to tackle the problems that will cause it. Dealing directly with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction may contain those threats, but it will not end them. The time bought by direct action must be used to solve some of the underlying problems. If states are to retain control, the first condition is that they should make peace with each other so that they can face the common threat of disorder together. A background of peace among states is essential both for a policy of containment and for self-preservation. States weaken and destroy themselves through war. Conflict fuels fanaticism and then gives the fanatics the means of destruction. Without the wars in Afghanistan there would have been no Osama bin Laden.
The second essay is about how to make peace. It begins as a general reflection on diplomacy, but concludes with a view of the conditions for the creation of a postmodern peace. It is written in admiration of the men and women who built the European peace and the transatlantic relationship after the
Second World War, the only example of a lasting peace among nations.
Eventually, the lessons of this success might teach us and others how to spread the peace more widely. The question is whether there will be enough time. Bringing European countries together after centuries of war was a remarkable feat, but it took a catastrophe to achieve it. And it was done against the background of a common history and culture. The most worrying thing about globalization is that it brings us new, more foreign enemies whose motives we barely understand.
It may be that modern science, which gave us the weapons, will also give us the means of controlling them. But history suggests that the solution to the problems of technology is better politics rather than better technology.
The third essay is a comment on Europe today. If we are going to keep out the storm that threatens us in the next decades, we have to harness for good the enormous potential that Europe represents. It will not be enough to leave the world to the United States. The conditions of peace in the twenty-first century are so difficult and the conditions of war so terrible that all must contribute together.
Robert Cooper
2003
The worst times in European history were in the fourteenth century, during and after the Hundred Years War, in the seventeenth century at the time of the Thirty Years War, and in the first half of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century may be worse than any of these.
The first two periods were times when order broke down, when church, state and other ties of obligation were losing their power to discipline men's aggression. In the fourteenth century, the old order of chivalry was fading; feudal ties, weakened in endless wars, were giving way to patriotism; and the Church was divided by France's creation of the Avignon Papacy. After the Hundred Years' War, bands of soldiers roamed the ruined landscape of France terrorizing the countryside.
In the seventeenth century, the Church was split by the new Protestant movements and the wars that followed were both wars between states and wars of religion. Bringing together the power of the state and the fanaticism of the faithful, these wars without limit and without mercy laid waste to central Europe. Social order all but collapsed. By some accounts, a third of the population of Germany died. Every ten years in a passion play, the citizens of the Bavarian town of Oberammergau still give thanks for their deliverance from the Swedes. For most countries outside Europe, too, the worst memories of history are of periods of disorder: the era of the warring states in China, for example. Golden ages are usually times of strong government.
The European crisis in the twentieth century showed that the opposite can also be true. The wars of twentieth-century Europe were the first great wars of industrial society, wars of machines as well as men; they were also wars of over-powerful states able to mobilize their societies as never before; and they were made more deadly by nationalism and ideology. In this multiple catastrophe, the single most important thing that went wrong was that technology overran political maturity. Those who started the First World War had expected it to resemble the short wars of their childhood, not understanding the capacity of an industrial age to deliver men and munitions endlessly to the front. For the remainder of that half-century the machinery of propaganda, control and murder was turned against domestic and foreign populations in Germany, the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Then, for a moment, it seemed as if the nuclear revolution might complete the triumph of technology over mankind; but somehow political wisdom returned and there was a pause in civilization's pursuit of self-destruction.
The new century risks being overrun by both anarchy and technology. The two great destroyers of history may reinforce each other. And there is enough materiel left over from previous centuries in the shape of national, ideological and religious fanaticisms to provide motives for the destruction.
Both the spread of terrorism and that of weapons of mass destruction point to a world in which Western governments are losing control. The spread of the technology of mass destruction represents a potentially massive redistribution of power away from the advanced industrial (and democratic) states towards smaller states that may be less stable and have less of a stake in an orderly world; or, more dramatically still, it may represent a redistribution of power away from the state itself and towards individuals, that is to say terrorists or criminals. If proliferation were to take place in this fashion it would not only be Western governments that would be losing control, but all those people who have an interest in an orderly world.
In the past, to be damaging an ideological movement had to be widespread to recruit enough support to take on authority. Probably there had to be genuine grievances behind it. Henceforth, comparatively small groups will be able to do the sort of damage which before only state armies or major revolutionary movements could achieve. A few fanatics with a 'dirty bomb' (one which sprays out radiological material) or biological weapons will be able to cause death on a scale not previously envisaged. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo's attempt to use anthrax in Tokyo failed, but sooner or later one of their successors will succeed somewhere in the world. A serious terrorist attack could be launched by perhaps sixty people, provided they were sufficiently committed, courageous and competent (or, alternatively, fanatical, foolhardy and fortunate). 0.000001 per cent of the population is enough. Emancipation, diversity, global communication - all the things that promise an age of riches and creativity - could also bring a nightmare in which states lose control of the means of violence and people lose control of their futures. Civilization and order rests on the control of violence: if it becomes uncontrollable there will be no order and no civilization.
The three essays in this collection are indirect reflections from different angles on this situation and on what can be done about it.
The first describes the state of the world and the state of the state, a decade after the end of the Cold War. The most obvious feature of this world is American power; but in the long run the most important facts may be the end of empire and the transformation of the state through globalization. The most hopeful feature is the emergence of the postmodern' system of security in Europe. And the most worrying is the encroachment of chaos on the civilized world - from around it and within it. Europe may be able to stop the approach of chaos through the Balkans or even from across the Mediterranean, but it may prove more difficult to deal with chaos in its own suburbs and declining industrial towns.
The descent into chaos will not happen quickly. There is still time to tackle the problems that will cause it. Dealing directly with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction may contain those threats, but it will not end them. The time bought by direct action must be used to solve some of the underlying problems. If states are to retain control, the first condition is that they should make peace with each other so that they can face the common threat of disorder together. A background of peace among states is essential both for a policy of containment and for self-preservation. States weaken and destroy themselves through war. Conflict fuels fanaticism and then gives the fanatics the means of destruction. Without the wars in Afghanistan there would have been no Osama bin Laden.
The second essay is about how to make peace. It begins as a general reflection on diplomacy, but concludes with a view of the conditions for the creation of a postmodern peace. It is written in admiration of the men and women who built the European peace and the transatlantic relationship after the
Second World War, the only example of a lasting peace among nations.
Eventually, the lessons of this success might teach us and others how to spread the peace more widely. The question is whether there will be enough time. Bringing European countries together after centuries of war was a remarkable feat, but it took a catastrophe to achieve it. And it was done against the background of a common history and culture. The most worrying thing about globalization is that it brings us new, more foreign enemies whose motives we barely understand.
It may be that modern science, which gave us the weapons, will also give us the means of controlling them. But history suggests that the solution to the problems of technology is better politics rather than better technology.
The third essay is a comment on Europe today. If we are going to keep out the storm that threatens us in the next decades, we have to harness for good the enormous potential that Europe represents. It will not be enough to leave the world to the United States. The conditions of peace in the twenty-first century are so difficult and the conditions of war so terrible that all must contribute together.
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