Word: schrag
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PETER SCHRAG...
...list of great pulse flutterers like Toynbee and Spengler must now be added the name of Peter Schrag. A knowledgeable and lively writer on the subject of education (Voices in the Classroom), Schrag has restricted himself here to American history. But alas, the apprentice pundit has not restricted himself enough. He is still the victim of that dread disease of Master Theorists: the single explanation...
What once made America great? What now makes America fairly awful? Schrag's answer to both questions: the WASP. The plot of Peter and the WASP goes like this...
...code on America as tight as the pillory. Ramrod stiff with duty, tense with work ethic, the code operated splendidly on the frontier, and more or less adequately until after World War II. But then WASP "defaulted on their birthright of cussedness and irreverence" and turned into what Schrag calls the "plastic WASP." Still claiming to be the model-the only model-for a Good American, the plastic WASP has ended up a crabby tyrant of pallid respectability...
...deficiencies of the Boston schools have been recounted before-most notably in Peter Schrag's sober, well-researched Village School Downtown, which was published last April. Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean Theodore Sizer contends that Ko zol's recital of the ills of the Boston schools could be duplicated in many other big U.S. school systems. By overstating and underdocumenting his blustery crusade, Kozol is pushing Boston's regressive school officials into an even more defensive stance rather than inspiring them to correct much that is undeniably wrong. Indeed, School Superintendent William Ohrenberger dismisses the entire...