Why recycling the stuff is not enough: Harper’s “Index” (March 1990) reminds us that five of the six leading hazardous wastes are chemicals used to make plastics.
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When preschool is better than school. Gillian McNamee and Joan McLane of the Erikson Institute on West Chicago followed up on local inner-city children who had attended a preschool literacy program and found that two-thirds of them were still reading above grade level–amazingly enough, to judge from the description of their neighborhood public schools in the Spencer Foundation Newsletter (March 1990): “Few classrooms had books available for children’s independent use. Some had collections of children’s story books in good condition, but the books were not available to the children. Reading or writing materials (e.g., pencils, crayons, paper) were provided for children only when they related to a specific teacher assignment…. Teachers in these schools assigned or directed virtually all the writing and reading activities. The study of reading usually consisted of identifying words or letters on the blackboard or on worksheets, or reading words in sentences in reading books (primers). The study of writing ordinarily involved completing some form of worksheet, or copying words and sentences from a blackboard…5 or 10 times. In contrast with their prekindergarten literacy experiences, children were given very few opportunities to experiment with their reading or writing skills in an unstructured environment.”
“Within the last 10 years we have even raised a kind of vegetarian necropolis for the counterculture in McDonald’s and Burger King: their new and highly successful salad bars stand like tombstones for the most concrete and irreversible achievements of another era’s culinary activism,” writes Daniel Harris in In These Times (April 4-10). In the book Appetite for Change, he writes, Warren Belasco “shows how the [1960s] counterculture’s hostility to intellectual discourse led to a treacherous vagueness of rhetoric…[and] the health-food movement’s easy cooptation by big business, which simply mimicked its slogans in meaningless phrases like ‘country fresh’ and ‘whole-wheat goodness.’”
