In this season, my evenings have a predictable shape. Dinner is over. I’ve scrubbed the pots, rinsed and deposited the dishes in the dishwasher, packed up the leftovers and wiped down the counters, my responsibilities in return for all the work Rosellen has put into preparing a consistently excellent dinner. Then I move to the television room to attempt to finish the day’s newspapers, hoping to...

Guiding Principles on School Reform All children can learn, given the proper school environment.The purpose of the Chicago Public Schools is the education of the whole child. The schoolhouse is the center of this educational process. Each school is unique and functions as an individual entity.The principal and teachers of a school, in cooperation with the parents and community, know best the...

One of the earliest stops on our annual return to New Hampshire used to be to the beautifully appointed Victorian house in Francestown where our dear friends Edith and Peter Milton lived. But when maintaining the house and navigating its stairs became more a burden than a delight, they exchanged the house for a cottage in a comfortable retirement community in a nearby town. The cottage’s...

I left New York exactly fifty years ago and have only been an occasional visitor since. I lived in Brooklyn for my first 21 years and later returned for another three year stay in my fifth year of marriage. I recognize how great and how unique the city is, but I’ve never harbored the slightest desire to live there again. Soon after we returned to NY from our years in Mississippi in 1968, we read...

I’m reaching back into the past today to recount a largely forgotten battle about school curriculum that has troubling parallels to today’s controversies about the teaching of what has been inaccurately labeled “Critical Race Theory.”       In 1972 a colleague and I suddenly found ourselves in charge of a fifth and sixth grade classroom in a four-room school in...