Pols, guns and androgyny

Robert Ames asks to clarify a reader's reference to a London train imbroglio involving Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife Cherie:

Cherie didn't have the correct change for the ticket-vending machine at the station she was boarding, but it was at one of the more outlying tube stations where there's no gate to get past. Hence, she did not "sneak" on; she just walked on like everyone else, intending to purchase a ticket at the station where she got off.

But they now have a policy of fining anyone that boards the Underground without a ticket, regardless of intent. Ms. Blair was unaware of this policy until she went to pay her fare after her ride. So please don't let people think that she stooped to sneaking onto the Underground.

Thanks, Mr. Ames. A veritable torrent of material has arrived on the sad state of contemporary American education. I hope to quote it all in time, but meanwhile here's a taste. A reader signing herself Sherry declares:

Being a high school English teacher, I just finished completing a three-year survey to evaluate the quality of my career preparation for the school of education at University of Wisconsin at Madison. It was both cathartic and infuriating.

Questioning and discussion methods are given scant importance in the face of popular, feel-good "theories" of education. Writing quality is pushed aside in the name of "process over product" teaching; indeed, I was never taught how to evaluate for quality in written material.

I learned theories at UW-Madison, not good teaching techniques. I was only taught to value "my emerging style." Subjectivity ruled the day.

I agree with Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, that schools of education, as presently constructed, are virtually worthless as practical preparation for a teaching career. The teachers unions and education bureaucrats, who have sold their souls to the limousine liberals of the Democratic Party, have poured choking oceans of p.c. mush into the public school system.

And now for a blazing manifesto from Alexis Kirschbaum:

As a recent graduate of Smith College, I felt that I had a personal stake in your comments about the discontinuance of Smith College's esteemed Art History survey course. The move by the college's administration and faculty points to a pervading academic laziness within certain camps of academics brought about by a fear of becoming culturally outmoded. Although I did receive a thorough classical education at Smith College from brilliant and engaged professors, the institution is unfortunately catering more and more to politically correct platitudes.

I could never determine if the student body, who experimented illimitably with their own sexual orientation but came to the classroom and dinner table uninterested in any topic that even remotely suggested controversy or erudition, would be considered a cause or an effect of this trend among the administration. As you might well guess, I was considered pretentious in this climate, but in fact, the hypocrisy of the women with blue hair, two girl friends, and an entourage chanting "free the oppressed" over a candle- lit dinner table, four-course meal and bon bons first made me retch and then bored me to tears.

I wasn't pretentious, just dissatisfied with the company. I would stare at them blankly as they "flouted the establishment" and thought to myself that my coevals have lost sight of the place of true revolution and blur the lines abysmally by failing to recognize the tradition of revolution in art. The confusing of political fact with the delicate knowledge afforded by the arts and the constant overshadowing of artistic inventiveness by ideas of purportedly political advancement left me socially beleaguered and intellectually jaded.

I enrolled in what I then conceived of as a sacred institution, only to become removed from the precious and ensconced in the mundane. So what I want to ask you is, as a professor, have you felt similar tremors in liberal arts institutions? Another thing: the "real world" is even more blasi toward what I consider invaluable, so what in the hell can I do with an English degree in today's world?

Wow! What a devastating report from what used to be the crown jewel of the elite Seven Sisters colleges. Smith's slide toward banality is the end result of a quarter century of anxiously p.c. feminist politics in the Lesbian La-La Land of northwestern rural Massachusetts. You of course confirm everything I have been railing about in American education since I arrived on the scene a decade ago.

All I can say to you and to all like-minded independent thinkers is that the best education is self-education. Timorous or trendy teachers can't stop you from plunging into the treasure house of the world's great books and art objects. Investigate, assimilate and then propagate your own ideas into the general culture. An intellectually awakened life is possible in any job. Don't be limited by your environment: It's just pasteboard walls, easily pierced by the spiritual eye.

Next Page: Hayley Mills' androgyny prefigured Mick Jagger's

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