Education in America

In 1946, the School of the Americas (SOA) was established in Panama (and later relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia) to provide security and combat training for Latin American soldiers. Over the years, its graduates, including former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, have been implicated in human rights abuses and acts of political violence. Lesley Gill chronicles […]

As a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, I’d like to have one more card in my wallet. The card I want, contrary to the views of most civil liberties activists, is a national ID card. Privacy advocates have always resisted this idea, for fear of government snooping on citizens. But that cat […]

By now, everyone’s seen the famous “Jesusland” map, wherein North America is divided in two, with the southern half designated as its own private Galilee. I have a number of objections to rearranging the continent this way. First of all, we lose almost all the great college football in exchange for a suicidal professional hockey […]

Last night, the Bush campaign delivered the Kerry camp a nice little political present when the president denied having said of Osama bin Laden, in 2002, “I truly am not that concerned about him” — practically forcing news channels to dredge up and play the clip in the days ahead. But on the domestic front, […]

Well, they done sent George W. Bush to Demeanor Re-education Camp. He don’t scowl no more. Don’t shout, neither. Not scowly, not shouty, ol’ W. was powerful better in the third debate than in those first two. By the second half, as he was movin’ away from the 98th recitation of the 98 times John […]

That America’s political center is to the right of every other modern democracy is nothing new, but why has it recently lurched so much further right? A belligerent cowboy president who says he’s doing God’s work seems on the verge of being elected to another term of office; both houses of Congress are in the […]

The dustup over charter schools reached the big time a few weeks back when it landed on the front page of The New York Times under the headline “Charter Schools Trail in Results, U.S. Data Reveals.” The story, which centered on a study by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), led this way: “The first […]

In a recent episode of South Africa’s version of Sesame Street, Takalani Sesame, a girl named Kami lets out a wail. When someone asks why she’s upset, she says, “I’m trying to express my emotions. I’m sad because my mum is gone. She died of AIDS.” She faces a relatively common problem in South Africa. […]

A very weird thing happened when Colin Powell announced a couple of weeks ago that he would not be speaking at — or even attending — this year’s Republican convention. The explanation that he and a few spokesmen offered, dutifully parroted by the press, was that, by tradition, cabinet secretaries do not attend party conventions. […]

Suddenly “Pomp and Circumstance” was booming out of the Zellerbach Auditorium sound system and there she was — my daughter Miranda, that short blonde in the front row (no mere mortarboard could obscure those locks) as the orchestra section filled up with hundreds of graduating University of California history majors last Friday morning. And just […]