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Turning Points

Thinking globally and locally at year's end

Leslie Cober-Gentry

ARE AMERICAN CHILDREN being educated well? Schooling through the secondary level has become nearly universal--a change from the not-too-distant past, when many jobs requiring brawn provided adequate pay for those who had tired of book learning. But now success in the workplace demands more conceptual skills, teamwork, and mastery of analytical tools. Sweeping economic and social change prompts Americans to debate the purposes, efficacy, and quality of public education.

You can join that debate in the company of Harvard-affiliated experts in "Strengthening the Schools" (page 62), another of Harvard Magazine's roundtable discussions of pressing current issues. Not all participants endorsed the current vogue for statewide testing and education performance standards. Other ideas--clarifying schools' mission and improving the training of teachers--may well resonate in communities nationwide, including your own.

Higher education at Harvard has arrived at a different turning point, with the formal transformation of Radcliffe College into the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, effective October 1. A news report, the latest in our series on Radcliffe, appears on page 86. With that change effected, Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich argues that the time is long overdue to reexamine Harvard's understanding of its own history, the better to include the role of women. Her pungent, forceful essay (page 50) illuminates and so begins to break down the institutional barriers that still divide the history of all members of the Harvard community.

Looking beyond Cambridge, manyfold alumnus Joel E. Cohen, a demographer, uses the tools of his trade to peer at the prospects for humanity and Planet Earth as the twentieth century gives way to the twenty-first (page 38). Primus examines exactly when that change occurs, giving due regard to Harvard experts of diverse opinions ("The College Pump," page 104). One of them, Stephen Jay Gould, notes in Questioning the Millennium that "An assiduous survey showed that the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania [not yet the "Ivy League"] all favored 1900-1901" as that century's turning point. The sages prevailed then, but this time popular opinion has dismissed expertise: come midnight on this December 31, most people will say farewell to this century and millennium. If they are wrong, they get a second chance.

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FINALLY, AN IN-HOUSE TRANSITION. IN SEPTEMBER, Matt Skelly left our staff for new challenges. Having served thousands of readers who use our classified ads, he then created Harvard Magazine's Internet edition, extending our reach worldwide and doing more than any other person here to bring us into the twenty-first century. His friends at 7 Ware Street wish him the very best.

~ John S. Rosenberg

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