I don't know what School of Journalism Jonah Goldberg attended but he obviously did well on Partisanship 101. He can be relied on to spice up his language to ensure the other side gets a good lashing. The "Washington elite turn their children into feedstock at private schools" implying they are a herd of unthinking cattle. According to him, the amorphous unnamed left-leaning socialists are busy indoctrinating children in how to think about racism. The left is sending their children to elite schools. How dare they? The ultimate hypocrisy. There's never a moment in any right wing editorial writer's life when society isn't threatened by leftist, progressive socialist leaning elites, an avant-guard of secret Marxists setting up the foundation for the 3rd Socialist Millennium. (That's my hyperbole.) Obviously Goldberg absorbed the basic lesson that that if you want to be a good partisan for a cause, just keep criticizing the opposition. He does it almost as well as Fox News.

Quite rightly Goldberg bases his ideas on his own experience of trying to get his daughter a good education. It must be difficult for conservatives to shield their children from what they believe to be brainwashing from the left. Learning the truth, however, is sometimes painful. At fourteen I went to school in France and when I asked the teacher what he thought about the British victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, he replied, "J'en n'ai jamais entendu parler." Never heard of it. "Waterloo?" "Ce n'etait pas important." The Battle of Austerlitz wasn't important. Unfortunately every country teaches its own version of history. When I was teaching in Japan the history text books took two paragraphs to cover the invasion of China 1936-45 but there was a whole Chapter on the bombing of Hiroshima and the suffering. No mention of Japanese atrocities like eating American pilots. That would be upsetting. When we start learning the truth about our history it can get very uncomfortable.

Goldberg maintains "teaching about racism, slavery and civil rights has been central to social studies curricula for years." I taught at an elite private Catholic girl's school in Phoenix for twenty years and barely heard a rumor of all that. Social studies was part of history and there was a big thick textbook. I personally taught Beloved by Toni Morrison and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (I confess I missed out the incest bits) for AP Literature but I can assure Jonah that my students knew next to nothing about slavery except that it existed sometime back in the past, a long time ago and that it was all over. I had to teach them the average number of slaves on each farm, the way the children were taken away from their mothers as babies to be sold as early as possible to stop the bonding and the importance of calves for the young male slaves. I found it extremely uncomfortable but when something is evil and degrading it needs describing responsibly. Too often the bits of history such as the genocide of Native Americans or the Vietnam War, where over 2 million Vietnamese were killed, are glossed over. The US army was in open revolt against what its government was asking them to do. They were ready to storm the Capitol. There are big blanks in Americans' understanding of their own history. We have to trust that our poorly paid teachers will teach our history fairly and sensitively and with an understanding for the sensibilities of the students.

The other skill mastered by Goldberg in his journalism classes was the "voice." He invokes the tone of a friendly, casual observer. "My wife and I were shopping for schools." "The most remarkable thing" "Well I can report." "But you know what..?" These neat rhetorical flourishes establish him as a sympathetic, casual observer and make his personal opinions, however contentious, more convincing. Stylistically he needs a few refreshers from Eng.101 to improve the style. Don't begin paragraphs with pronouns like "It" or with conjunctions like "but" or "and" (There are reasons) and avoid one sentence paragraphs and always start with a thesis sentence. Espouse the art of brevity. End with an appropriate quotation. It sounds authoritative. Voltaire is one of my favorites "I may disagree with what you say but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it." (Voltaire might have said it or Evelyn Beatrice or someone... but I agree with it.) Your homework should be to read The New Yorker, with the best writers in English in America and the world for that matter. And I stick by that. Perhaps a final quotation from WS. "Truth's a dog and must to kennel." Woof. (personal joke re times published by AZR)