In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg, at the time Germany’s pre-eminent scientist and the head of its atom bomb program, traveled to Nazi-occupied Copenhagen to visit his old friend and mentor, Niels Bohr. Both were Nobel laureates; both were among the giants of modern theoretical physics. Eighteen months later, Bohr would escape and work on the […]
Peter Schrag
Peter Schrag, a longtime education writer and editor, is the co-author of When Europe Was a Prison Camp: Father and Son Memoirs, 1940-41 (Indiana University Press, 2015) and author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future, and California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment. He is a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee.
Posted inFeatures
California, Dreamed
P eople who try to get their arms around California inevitably have trouble. The place is too large, diverse, and complex; it isn’t really one place at all, except maybe in the minds of outsiders. So it’s not surprising that Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, the monumentally ambitious and grandly titled show […]
Posted inFeatures
Going Holistic
University of California President Richard C. Atkinson’s loud call in February for abolishing the use of the SAT I test in undergraduate admissions is likely to have a lot more significance outside the UC system than within. Atkinson’s university has already spent the last four years quietly butsystematically de-emphasizing the test (originally called the Scholastic […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Rank Class
Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test 12.02.99 | reviewed by Peter Schrag The late Albert Shanker, longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, sometimes made the facetious suggestion that if children were all awarded college diplomas at birth, knowledge would be pursued for its own sake and a great many of the problems of American […]
Posted inEducation in America
The New School Wars: How Outcome-Based Education Blew Up
It seemed like a conservative idea; then progressive educators got hold of it. Now a firestorm has erupted that could jeopardize the effort to raise national curriculum standards.