Soundings, October 2003
If inner-city parents want an intellectually rigorous and well-disciplined school for their children, what can they do? Private schools in America are too expensive, absent a voucher program. Suburbs, once the preferred oases of educational sanity, have now fallen victim to the same cultural liberation that afflicts urban centers. Thus, an emerging solution for parents who do not want their children to grow up as intellectual and moral savages is to send them to school in—Africa. A story in the New York Times (September 3) quotes a girl in Washington, D.C., who says of her school back in Ghana: "'The goal is just learning, not to be average but to be at the top of the class. You feel out of place if you're not trying; that's sometimes not the case here.'" Indeed. According to Silas Anamelechi, a Ph.D. candidate at Howard University who was sent to high school in Nigeria: "'I saw it as a punishment then. Now I see it as a blessing. A couple of those friends I had started to run around with have been shot and killed.'"
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Hong Kong's massive demonstrations for freedom, last July, have brought China to a crossroad. So writes University of Pennsylvania professor Arthur Waldron: "For most of the six years since its return to Chinese control in 1997 under the rubric of 'One Country, Two Systems,' Hong Kong has served as perhaps the single most important piece of evidence for three fundamental assumptions underlying our policy toward the People's Republic of China (PRC). The first of these is that the government in Beijing is not so much ideological as pragmatic and flexible: hence its willingness to grant at least a semblance of self-government to Hong Kong, now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic. The second is that the liberality displayed toward Hong Kong is a signal of the longer-term course that the Beijing leadership has set for China as a whole: toward more openness and increased political as well as economic freedom. The final assumption is that the reasonableness Beijing has demonstrated in Hong Kong will eventually persuade the people of Taiwan to adopt a similar model, and enter China at no cost to their democracy or freedom but with great benefit to the trust and cordiality of the relationship between Beijing and Washington. These comfortable assumptions look to have been completely overturned by the mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in July." Read the whole article: "Hong Kong and the Future of Freedom," Commentary, September 2003. It is available online at www.commentarymagazine.com/waldron.html.
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Our friends the South Koreans: "There also is widespread disappointment among Muslims that Iraq did not put up more of a fight against the U.S. and its allies. Overwhelming majorities in Morocco (93%), Jordan (91%), Lebanon (82%), Turkey (82%), Indonesia (82%), and the Palestinian Authority (81%) say they are disappointed the Iraqi military put up so little resistance. Many others around the world share that view, including people in South Korea (58%)" (the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Views of a Changing World, 2003). One must always view with caution the results of polls taken in unfree states, but that does not include South Korea.