Across Serpukhvskaya Street from my apartment is a vintage Soviet-style “Palace of Culture,” its blank concrete walls topped by an immense neon sign. Ten years ago it offered lectures on class consciousness to factory workers; now it houses a discotheque, which plays American rock music until 6 A.M. Ten years ago an order from the...
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Letter From Russia Orthodoxy and Nationalism
Early in my first Russian-language course, our professor noted that the word for “Sunday” is the same as the word for “resurrection.” Somebody asked her how that word had managed to survive under 70 years of totalitarian atheism. She replied that Russian is so permeated with Christian images that it would be impossible to remove...
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Rubber Hands and Iron Triangles
“In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.” —F.W. Nietzsche After a decade of “reform,” the public schools are at best stagnant. The College Board reports that SAT scores for college-hound 12th-graders have dropped for the fourth consecutive year, with the...
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Want To Reform Public Education?
By now it should be obvious that “education reform” is a fraud. Its primary goal has not been to rescue children from public school malpractice, but to rescue the schools from angry parents and taxpayers. The 1980’s saw per-pupil spending climb by about one-third beyond inflation, almost entirely for doing more of the same rather...