Critical essay cry beloved country

Single-sex education (teaching boys and girls in separate classrooms or schools) is an old approach that’s gaining new momentum. While single-sex education has long existed in many private schools, it’s a relatively new option for public schools. The National Association for critical essay cry beloved country Single-Sex Public Education estimates that approximately 400 public schools now offer some form of single-sex education. What is fueling this movement? And what are the risks and benefits of single-sex education? A driving force in the single-sex education movement is recent research showing natural differences in how males and females learn. Putting this research into practice, however, has triggered a debate that extends beyond pure academics. Political, civil rights, socioeconomic and meaning of expository essay legal concerns also come into play. As the debate heats up, it helps to understand all sides of the issue. Before weighing the pros and cons of single-sex education, consider the influences of “nature versus nurture.” Many factors affect each child’s learning profile and critical essay cry beloved preferences: Some factors relate to dreamscapes, the child’s nature, such as gender, temperament, abilities (and disabilities), and intelligence. Critical Essay! Other influences stem from the way parents and society nurture the child: Family upbringing, socioeconomic status, culture and stereotypes all fall under the “nurture” category. According to Leonard Sax, founder of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education, “…whenever girls and essays anthem by robert boys are together, their behavior inevitably reflects the larger society in which they live.” Depending on one’s point of view, this statement can trigger arguments both for essay cry beloved country and against dreamscapes, single-sex education. Making the case for single-sex education. Those who advocate for single-sex education in public schools argue that: Some parents don’t want their children to country, be in mixed-gender classrooms because, especially at dreamscapes, certain ages, students of the opposite sex can be a distraction. Leonard Sax and others agree that merely placing boys in critical essay separate classrooms from girls accomplishes little. But single-sex education enhances student success when teachers use techniques geared toward the gender of their students. Essay! Some research indicates that girls learn better when classroom temperature is warm, while boys perform better in cooler classrooms. If that’s true, then the temperature in a single-sex classroom could be set to optimize the learning of either male or female students. Some research and reports from educators suggest that single-sex education can broaden the educational prospects for both girls and boys. Advocates claim co-ed schools tend to reinforce gender stereotypes, while single-sex schools can break down gender stereotypes. For example, girls are free of the pressure to compete with boys in male-dominated subjects such as math and science. Boys, on the other hand, can more easily pursue traditionally “feminine” interests such as music and poetry. One mother, whose daughter has attended a girls-only school for three years, shared her experience on the GreatSchools parent community: “I feel that the single gender environment has given her a level of confidence and informed interest in math and science that she may not have had otherwise.” Federal law supports the option of single-sex education. Cry Beloved Country! In 2006, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings eased federal regulations, allowing schools to offer single-sex classrooms and act generosity schools, as long as such options are completely voluntary. Essay Cry Beloved! This move gives parents and school districts greater flexibility. What critics say about essays on ayn edited mayhew single-sex education. Those who claim single-sex education is ineffective and/or undesirable make the cry beloved, following claims: Few educators are formally trained to use gender-specific teaching techniques. However, it’s no secret that experienced teachers usually understand gender differences and are adept at accommodating a variety of essay learning styles within their mixed-gender classrooms. Gender differences in learning aren’t the essay cry beloved country, same across the board; they vary along a continuum of what is considered normal. For a sensitive boy or an assertive girl, the teaching style promoted by advocates of single-sex education could be ineffective (at best) or detrimental (at worst). For example, a sensitive boy might be intimidated by a teacher who “gets in essays rand anthem edited mayhew his face” and speaks loudly believing “that’s what boys want and need to learn.” Students in single-sex classrooms will one day live and work side-by-side with members of the opposite critical sex. Educating students in single-sex schools limits their opportunity to work cooperatively and co-exist successfully with members of the opposite meaning sex. At least one study found that the critical country, higher the percentage of girls in a co-ed classroom, the better the academic performance for all students (both male and female). Professor Analia Schlosser, an economist from the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv, found that elementary school, co-ed classrooms with a majority of female students showed increased academic performance for both boys and thesis about girls. In high school, the essay, classrooms with the best academic achievement were consistently those that had a higher percentage of girls. Dr. Schlosser theorizes that a higher percentage of girls lowers the amount of classroom disruption and fosters a better relationship between all students and mla thesis the teacher. The American Council on cry beloved country, Education reports that there is less academic disparity between male and nurse essay female students overall and a far greater achievement gap between students in different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups, with poor and minority students children faring poorly. Critical Essay! Bridging that academic chasm, they argue, deserves more attention than does the gender divide. Single-sex education is illegal and paper discriminatory, or so states the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) . In May 2008, the ACLU filed suit in federal court, arguing that Breckinridge County Middle School’s (Kentucky) practice of offering single-sex classrooms in their public school is illegal and discriminatory. Essay Country! The school doesn’t require any child to attend a single-sex class, yet the suit argues that the mla thesis citation, practice violates several state and critical essay cry beloved federal laws, including Title IX and the equal Educational Opportunities Act. How does the general public view single-sex education? To answer that question, Knowledge Networks conducted a nationwide survey in early 2008. (Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University sponsored the survey.) Survey results indicate: More than one-third of Americans feel parents should have the option of sending their child to a single-sex school. Mla Thesis Paper Citation! (25% of critical country respondents oppose the idea.) Yet when asked if they’d consider a single-sex school for their own children, only 14% said they “definitely would” and 28% said they “probably would.” The fact remains that there are relatively few single-sex schools in about arthritis our nation’s public education system, and where they do exist, they are offered as an option rather than a requirement. Critical Essay Country! If the single-sex education movement continues, you may find yourself in of expository essay a position to vote for or against it in country your own community. The best low-cost and free tools to help get your child into college. How longer recess fuels stronger child development. How do so many top students end up in remedial classes? Straight-A students in remedial classes — unprepared by their high schools to thesis, succeed in college. When should kids start kindergarten? Does redshirting kindergarten later help, or hurt, a child? Why is our public school trying to essay, get rid of nurse essay my child? 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A new collection of Gore Vidal's essays showcases five decades of literary and political criticism, with his mocking, disenchanted patriotism in all its eloquence. Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions every Tuesday. Thank you for essay country, signing up. For more from The Nation , check out our latest issue. Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to essays by robert mayhew help us continue to cry beloved country write about the issues that matter. Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can each week. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? Doubleday Gore Vidal. Gore Vidal has known, or at paper citation, any rate met, nearly everyone of literary, political or cinematic note during his lifetime. A great many of his essays feature anecdotes, always charming and often revealing, about his personal encounters with his subjects: Tennessee Williams, Dawn Powell, Christopher Isherwood, Norman Mailer, Paul Bowles, Anthony Burgess, Italo Calvino, Amelia Earhart, Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra, the Roosevelts, Luces, Kennedys, Reagans and Gores among them. I have never met Gore Vidal. But that seems a paltry reason for not beginning this homage in critical cry beloved country the proper Vidalian key. Nurse! All right, then… One night in the winter of 1970, I was driving a taxicab in New York City. Outside a posh club, I was hailed by a tall, handsome gent in evening dress. Essay Cry Beloved! “Old bores,” he muttered as he climbed in. “Money and essays on ayn anthem edited brains; never the twain shall meet without giving rise to truly lethal tedium.” “Wherever I can find some intelligent company,” he sighed. From a certain lyrical eloquence in critical cry beloved the sigh, I guessed he meant literary company. “How about of expository Elaine’s?” I suggested, glancing at him in essay cry beloved country the rearview mirror. He winced. “No-o-o, thank you. Norman is probably presiding tonight. I’m not feeling sufficiently…existential.” “The Gotham Book Mart is probably still open. Lots of writers hang out there, I think.” The handsome face wrinkled in distaste. “Also a few literary parasites, I’m afraid. I doubt I could control myself if I spotted Truman’s malicious mug leering in my direction.” “Well, maybe the White Horse Tavern?” He blanched. Arthritis! “Good God, no. Anaïs sometimes holds court there, fabulating reminiscences and emanating her legendary Life Force. Of course, she’s the critical source of essay that legend.” I looked more closely in essay cry beloved country the rearview, and this time I recognized him. “You’re Gore Vidal, aren’t you?” Wary, noncommittal, slightly amused, he murmured: “Possibly.” I was inspired. “Well, why don’t I just drive you home? Then you can have a nightcap alone, in the company of the most extraordinary assemblage of wit and talent since JFK invited all those intellectuals to dinner at the White House.” He snorted appreciatively, reached over and patted my head, and when I let him off at about, his hotel, gave me the biggest tip of my short cab-driving career. Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. has always enjoyed a healthy appreciation of his own, indeed remarkable, wit and talent. So have most other people, though approbation of his moral character has perhaps been less close to universal. His successes–bestselling novels, Broadway plays, screenplays, two enchanting memoirs and five decades of scintillating literary and political criticism–would be tedious to chronicle (and superfluous in the Age of Wikigooglespace). But what do they add up to? Is he famous for some more enduring reason than… being famous? He grew up in the penumbra of essay fame. His maternal grandfather, T.P. Gore, was more or less heroic: blind, Oklahoma’s first senator and a friend of Bryan and Darrow, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. His father, Gene Vidal, was an All-American football player, World War I aviator, friend of Lindbergh and Earhart and founder of TWA. His mother later married that socialite of socialites Hugh Auchincloss, who would later become Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s stepfather as well. In the vast attic of his grandparents’ house in Rock Creek Park were thousands of books. Up there and downstairs, reading to meaning of expository essay his grandfather, he acquired an education. At school–he attended St. Alban’s, like his younger cousin Albert Arnold Gore–he picked up Latin and fell in love with a godlike fellow student, who died a few years later, young and still perfect, on Iwo Jima. As told in cry beloved Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest , it is on ayn by robert one of the critical essay cry beloved country most stirring love stories in recent literature. A veteran himself, Vidal published one of the first World War II novels, Williwaw . Public service in of expository essay the family tradition was one possible future. Instead he wrote The City and the Pillar , a novel about a youthful homosexual affair that one of the boys, but not the other, leaves behind. Critical! So much for his political career, at act generosity essay, least as of 1948. Vidal spent the ’50s in the trenches, writing for television, Hollywood and Broadway. He cavorted with the stars–Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and far too many others to critical country mention. More perilously for his soul’s health, he also cavorted with the Kennedys. But by the end of paper citation 1961, the moral and intellectual hollowness of Camelot was plain to him. Country! With his nest egg, he left for essays rand anthem edited mayhew, Italy and cry beloved country novel writing. Dreamscapes! In that place (which he left several years ago) and that activity he spent what he would doubtless call, with self-delighting double entendre, the better part of his life. It would be hard–and is, of essay course, unnecessary–to decide whether Vidal’s novels or his essays are his greatest achievement. Dreamscapes! Certainly the seven-volume “American Chronicles” series is in the front rank of historical fiction; and at essay country, least two volumes, Burr and Lincoln , are indisputably masterpieces. Julian , it seems safe to wager, will long remain the only novel set in the fourth century, with a protagonist dedicated to turning back the fateful onrush of Christian fanaticism, ever to ascend to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Myra Breckinridge was a minor milestone in the sexual revolution–perhaps not so minor. Essay writing was an dreamscapes, afterthought. Edmund Wilson, too, would have preferred writing novels and plays to literary journalism–who wouldn’t?–but he was never as successful as Vidal. As a result, Vidal tells us in critical cry beloved Palimpsest , I never wrote a proper essay until 1954, when I read a new translation of Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars . Suddenly, I had so many new thoughts on the subject of essay sex and power that I was obliged to write an essay country, essay…ot for publication but just to nurse application clear my own mind. Eventually, it was published…and that is how I became an essayist. I wrote first for myself; then for those few readers who might be interested in the resulting essai . It was, he acknowledged, “not exactly novel writing, which I missed, but it was prose and essay cry beloved kept me thinking” while he was churning out act generosity essay, those scripts, earning that nest egg. The fruits of cry beloved those fifty-plus years of thinking on paper are harvested in meaning Selected Essays . Essay Cry Beloved! The first thing to say is that this new collection does not replace United States: Essays 1952-1992 and The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 . Nothing could. The former, in particular, is the best essay collection in recent decades by any American writer, except perhaps for last year’s two-volume Library of America edition of Edmund Wilson. At 1,300 pages, United States is, however, a little bulky. So there is every reason to cheer Vidal on his way to Valhalla with the paper publication of this compact yet comprehensive and very well-chosen volume. Country! Editor Jay Parini has served up a kind of about arthritis crème de la crème with strawberries. Vidal is perhaps better known for his raspberries, which are well represented here by “American Plastic,” “The Hacks of Academe” and “The Top Ten Best-Sellers According to the Sunday New York Times as of January 7, 1973.” The first of these, though by no means a hatchet job, does make one grateful not to critical essay cry beloved country have read much of John Barth or Donald Barthelme. It also expresses a far more discriminating admiration for William Gass than is usual among reviewers of that overadmired writer. But nothing in “American Plastic” equals the joyous havoc wrought on the bestsellers, whose roots, structural and thematic, in bad Hollywood movies Vidal convincingly demonstrates. Poor Herman Wouk ( Winds of War ) and Frederick Forsyth ( The Odessa File ) receive a brisk version of the treatment meted out to James Gould Cozzens by Dwight Macdonald and to Judith Krantz by Clive James. Even “the noble engineer Solzhenitsyn” ( August 1914 ), though an exemplar of “man’s indomitable spirit in a tyrannous society,” is chiefly talented at “describing how things work, and it is plain that nature destined him to write manuals of artillery or instructions on how to take apart a threshing machine.” Though Vidal can be devastatingly snide (“Rabbit’s Own Burrow” makes John Updike pay very dearly indeed for mla thesis paper citation, a few censorious remarks about our hero and other “frivolous” opponents of the Vietnam War), his generosity is critical country more characteristic and on ayn rand anthem by robert even more satisfying. Critical Cry Beloved! Some of his subjects in Selected Essays , like Tennessee Williams and Edmund Wilson, may not have needed critical rehabilitation, but William Dean Howells and Dawn Powell did. Twenty-five years ago, Howells was frequently dismissed as dry and paper lifeless, the essay faded flower of a genteel tradition. Explicating Indian Summer , A Modern Instance and essays anthem edited by robert The Rise of critical essay Silas Lapham , Vidal reconstructs Howells’s “subtle and mla thesis paper citation wise reading of the critical world,” which “opened the way to Dreiser and to all those other realists who were to see the United States plain.” And the first half-dozen pages of the Howells essay contain a surprising revelation. As the dreamscapes judicial murder of the Haymarket Square defendants unfolded in 1886, “of the Republic’s major literary and critical essay intellectual figures…only one”–Howells–“took a public stand.” Dawn Powell’s novels were all out of print in 1987 when Vidal’s long appreciation in The New York Review of Books pronounced her “our best comic novelist.” Her studies of genuine Midwestern dullness and ersatz Manhattan gaiety, rendered with fearless, pungent wit and entirely without sentimentality or euphemism, may have been, as Vidal claimed, “Balzacian” and as good a portrait as we have of mid-twentieth-century America. Essays Rand Anthem Edited By Robert! But in country this they were fatally unlike the top ten bestsellers of about arthritis 1973 or any other year. She died more or less obscure in critical 1965, and Vidal’s influential revaluation doubtless brought a smile to her long-suffering shade. The hacks of academe (new generation) have put it about that everything is political, especially textual analyses of great literature that reveal, through the application of emancipatory ideology and subversive wordplay, that the on ayn edited by robert past was even less enlightened than the present. Besides allowing critical minnows to patronize artistic whales, this approach frees academic literary intellectuals from having to learn much about history, economics, politics or how to compose felicitous English prose. Without ever saying so, Vidal also manages to suggest that everything is political, though in a very different, non-postmodern sense. Critical Essay! The clarity and on ayn mayhew elegance of his prose, for example, make a political point: that a critic with public purposes has rhetorical obligations, above all transparency. More generally, to a sufficiently sensitive and knowledgeable critic, everything will appear intelligent or unintelligent, skillful or shoddy, graceful or graceless, truthful or mendacious. In each of these pairs, the latter is–not immediately, perhaps, but ultimately, in some measure–a threat to our common life, our res publica . Intellectual virtues are civic virtues; intellectual vices leave the critical essay cry beloved country citizens vulnerable to superstition and essay demagoguery. There is, of course, no more sense in trying to legislate the intellectual virtues than the moral ones. But one can propagate intellectual virtue, first of all by example. This is Vidal’s abiding contribution to American politics. The prevailing American superstitions are: one, there is a Supreme Being, omnipotent and benevolent; two, some sexual predilections are more natural than others; and critical essay cry beloved country three, there is no class system in thesis about the United States. No one who denies any of these things can be elected to high office. As a patriot, Vidal naturally has no patience with this affront to our civic intelligence. Some of his most memorable onslaughts on our national delusions are included in Selected Essays . “Monotheism and Its Discontents,” a version of which appeared in these pages (July 13, 1992), is forthright. “The great unmentionable evil at the center of critical cry beloved our culture is essays mayhew monotheism.” Vidal’s dislike is essay cry beloved ecumenical; Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all “sky-god religions.” The sky-god is, alas, a jealous god, whose intolerance and nurse application essay blood lust have set a very bad example for his more devoted followers, whose unyielding irrationality managed in only a few decades, Vidal laments, to pervert the founders’ entirely secular purposes. “Monotheism” was written in 1992; sixteen years later, the danger is country much more widely recognized. Act Generosity! I suspect Vidal’s puckish but prescient call for “an all-out war on the monotheists” had some effect in stimulating the cry beloved country salutary secularist counteroffensive. In (possibly premature) retrospect, it appears that one historical function of neoconservatism was to supply an intellectual rationale for the worst impulses of traditional conservatism. The attack on the welfare state rationalized–in effect if not intention–greed and class privilege. With the same qualification, the dreamscapes attack on affirmative action rationalized racial hostility. The attack on multilateralism and international law has, less ambiguously, rationalized national chauvinism and essay aggressive tribalism. Midge Decter’s “The Boys on the Beach,” a vaguely Freudian analysis of homosexuality as pathology, published in Commentary in 1980, was a not at all ambiguous effort to rationalize sexual bigotry. But thanks to Vidal, this was the least successful of all the thesis arthritis neoconservative ideological operations. “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star”–perhaps his best-known essay–so thoroughly demolished Decter’s smug fatuities that neither the essay cry beloved country pseudo-psychoanalytic approach to nurse application essay homosexuality nor, mercifully, Decter herself ever regained intellectual respectability. My favorites among Vidal’s essays, both included in this volume, are “Homage to Daniel Shays” and essay country “The Second American Revolution.” Soon after the Revolutionary War, the eternal tension between lenders and borrowers, the rich and everyone else, came to a crisis in New England. Shays led thousands of small farmers, many of them former soldiers in the revolutionary army who stood to lose their land to creditors, in mla thesis search of debt relief and tax relief. Essay Cry Beloved! The rich fought back, first militarily and then by writing a Constitution that imposed a strong central government disproportionately weighted in favor of the propertied. That Constitution has become the American Scripture, our political Holy Writ and a chronic obstacle to popular initiative. Dissolving the about arthritis mystique of the Constitution and essay country those who framed it, as well as that of the revered Federalist Papers –whose “general tone,” Vidal accurately observes, “is that of a meeting of the act generosity essay trust department of Sullivan and Cromwell”–is essential to critical country our civic health. These two essays, along with Vidal’s historical fiction, are powerful dissolving agents. Disabusing Americans about their government’s international behavior is on ayn anthem mayhew equally essential. After a PEN benefit one night in the mid-1980s, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. confided to country his diary, “Gore gave a (relatively) polished talk about the American empire, banal in content, cheap in tone, and delivered to the accompaniment of on ayn rand anthem by robert mayhew smiles of vast self-satisfaction.” Presumably it was the tone Schlesinger objected to; his own self-satisfied banalities about the American empire were always pronounced with reverence and gravitas. Vidal’s bête noire (and not surprisingly, Schlesinger’s hero) was Harry Truman. The National Security Act of 1947; the creation of the CIA, with its unconstitutional exemption from essay Congressional scrutiny; the containment doctrine, supposedly for defense against Soviet expansionism but promptly invoked to justify the act generosity essay rearming of Germany and critical essay cry beloved country interventions in Greece, Guatemala, Iran and essay elsewhere; the paranoid secret blueprint for the cold war, NSC-68–all these Truman-era setbacks for democracy are described in “The National Security State,” along with a modest and sensible five-point program that, decades later, still sounds like a very good way to begin reclaiming the country. It’s not clear, though, to critical country me and I suspect to arthritis Vidal, that American democracy can be reclaimed, at least in the form of vigorous, Jeffersonian self-government. (As Vidal points out with his customary sardonic relish, Jefferson began selling out Jeffersonianism during his second term.) The reasons are structural–mass production and mass consumption may not leave enough room for individual autonomy–and clinical–like muscles, intellectual and civic virtues may atrophy beyond repair. Cry Beloved! No matter who is elected president this fall, the country may become an ever more dispiriting place for a conservative-radical aristocratic republican of Vidal’s stamp. If so, he has much to essay teach us about grace in cry beloved an era of decline. Twice before, he has lived, in imagination, through the death of a cherished ideal. The first was paganism, splendidly memorialized in dreamscapes Julian . In that novel’s climactic scene, the critical eponymous emperor appeals to the assembled Christian bishops, who are bent on destroying traditional religion, “never to forget that the greatness of meaning of expository essay our world was the gift of other gods and a different, more subtle philosophy, reflecting the variety in nature.” Of course, that more subtle philosophy was soon driven underground, where it has remained ever since. But things can live a long time underground, especially when nourished by occasional infusions like Julian . “French Letters: Theories of the New Novel,” another well-known essay reprinted here, reports on the programmatic writings of Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Roland Barthes and their American enthusiasts, none of whom saw much of critical cry beloved country a future for dreamscapes, the traditional novel. Vidal agreed, not because the traditional novel is exhausted but because its traditional audience has been captured by electronic distractions. He greeted this melancholy prospect with barbed but eloquent stoicism: The portentous theorizings of the critical essay cry beloved New Novelists are of no more use to us than the self-conscious avant-gardism of those who are forever trying to nurse figure out critical essay cry beloved country, what the application essay next “really serious” thing will be when it is plain that there is critical country not going to be a next serious thing in the novel. Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to dreamscapes want to practice it, or even to read it. Critical! In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and dreamscapes writing books, pretending all the cry beloved country while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to meaning essay attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words. Whatever dreariness lies ahead for our endlessly benighted and bamboozled republic, Gore Vidal’s mocking, disenchanted patriotism will always be a resource for its well-wishers. George Scialabba George Scialabba is the critical cry beloved author of Divided Mind and, most recently, What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament (forthcoming), both from Pressed Wafer. To submit a correction for our consideration, click here. For Reprints and Permissions, click here. Good Riddance, Tom Price. But What About the Other Grifters? From Free Lunch to Public Banks, These Cities Are Giving Us Hope. 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