David Elkind, the Tufts University professor of child development, reminds us that, “every child is like all other children, like some other children, and like no other child.” Or, as he says, there is the biological, social, and psychological child. My biological grandson will eventually walk upright and use language to make his wants known, [...]
Archive for July 2009
My Three Grandsons
July 8, 2009Socialism, why don’t we just let it fade away? It’s not even an old soldier.
July 5, 2009I have friends, family members, who continue to insist that Obama is a socialist. There seems to be absolutely nothing I can do or say that gets them onto another track of thinking (if calling anyone names —Obama, socialist, for example— can even be called thinking). There are just so many problems with this particular [...]
Aptocracy
July 5, 2009It’s true that much that we recognize as merit is not tested. (See the article by Walter Kirn in today’s NYTimes.) Schooling and testing right up to and on through the SATS is most of all a measure of one’s aptitude, one’s mental quickness, one’s readiness with and understanding of words and numbers, and in [...]
Old Europe
July 2, 2009Timothy Garton Ash begins his October, 2006, N Y Review article, Islam in Europe, with this account of his visit to the famous basilica of Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris: “I admired the magnificent tombs and funerary monuments of the kings and queens of France, including that of Charles Martel (“the hammer”), whose victory [...]
