The shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, are still reverberating—accentuating some of the enormous problems with public education. American high schools are plagued with low academic standards, moral relativism, political correctness, student apathy, and social permissiveness. All of this has led to a deterioration in students’ commitment to learning, their sense of direction,...

The Economist brands racism as “America’s constant curse,” and the question of race unnerves almost everybody, as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 airily outlaws discrimination in government, commerce, and schooling on grounds of race, gender, age, religion, or national origin, and the new, openly politicized White House policy on affirmative action (“mend it, don’t...

Bittersweet feelings swept over me, a child of swing, during a recent walk down Manhattan’s Times Square after an absence of several decades. At the end of the walk (Broadway and 42nd Street) two other feelings emerged: there’s a permanence in things notwithstanding change. And all of us are, inescapably, creatures of culture. I felt...