Word: sobol
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...real question here isn't why Jeffries persists in insulting Jews or other whites, along with blacks who don't share his views. Bigots are bigots. What's curious is the determination with which educational administrators in New York City and state--like Harleston and Education Commissioner Thomas Sobol--continue to place Jeffries on search committees and key curricular revision panels...
...most revolutionary changes propounded by the Sobol panel are harder to identify, since they rest on a series of buried premises that are offered, sometimes glancingly, as assumptions shared by all Americans. But are they? Does everyone agree that "education should be a source of strength and pride" for diverse ethnic groups? How about the notion that teaching individuals to fulfill their own abilities is secondary to training them to participate in "cultural interdependence"? Or that U.S. children should view themselves as citizens of the world rather than of America? Are we all on the same page when it comes...
...already have. Two members of the Sobol panel -- Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. -- inserted their dissents from the report's conclusions within the report itself. Said Jackson: "I would argue that it is politically and intellectually unwise for us to attack the traditions, customs and values which attracted immigrants to these shores in the first place." Also appended, somewhat jarringly in the prescribed context of racial and ethnic harmony, is a lengthy statement by Ali A. Mazrui, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York, Binghamton, arguing that...
...things -- not just in New York but in school systems across the nation -- get to the muddy pass epitomized by the Sobol report? Principally because an abstract theory happened to catch and ride a new wave of actuality. The idea of multicultural education in its most extravagant current form was born during the 1960s amid the campus turbulence and intellectual stimulation provoked by the civil rights movement and, later, protests against the war in Vietnam. The established centers of authority in U.S. life were not holding; to defend traditional values in the teeth of outraged demonstrations by young people...
...that is not the vision conveyed by many of the multiculturalists, those veterans of the '60s and their younger colleagues, who looked at the people ( arriving in their classrooms and noticed that many of them, in some cases nearly all of them, had no connection whatsoever with Europe. As Sobol himself has noted, "By the year 2000, 1 out of 3 children in New York public schools will be minority. In New York City, 1 out of 4 children under 10 has non- English-speaking immigrant parents. This is not the world of the 1950s...