By Rafe Champion

Charles Lane , ‘Boxed In,’ The New Republic, April, 1998.

A few years ago some of the conservatives writing in Quadrant were boosting the Japanese economic miracle as the very model of modern economic management and a standing reproach to market liberals and free traders. Round about the same time Japan went into recession and has yet to emerge from it. The new Prime Minister has promised to do whatever needs to be done to turn the ship around, but Lane doubts that Japan has the kind of political culture that will enable the PM or anyone else to ‘think outside the box’ of tradition to make his promise a reality.

Lane suggests that the façade of Japanese efficiency concealed the shocking reality that the political and economic fabric was riddled with corruption. The ‘seemingly magical consensus’ between government and industry turned out to be ‘nothing more than an interlocking system of interest-group payoffs.’

Faced with prolonged recession and a mounting sense of crisis, the real problem is a lack of leaders who have genuine faith in the free thought, free trade and the seemingly strident and discordant political debate that occurs in genuine democracies. Lane finds these qualities in abundance in the US where economic growth is high, unemployment is low, crime is being slashed, vast industries deregulated, the federal deficit seriously tackled, and welfare dependency reduced. ‘While Japan has dithered, the US has been finding solutions to many of the country’s longstanding social and economic ills.’

Sam Kazman, ‘The Mother of all Food Fights,’ Competitive Enterprise Institute Update, May 1998.

Kazman suggests that there would be blood in the streets if the federal government tried to regulate the food served in restaurants. ‘Vegetarians would be fighting with meat-eaters, Jews and Moslems would battle pork fanciers, teetotalers would have at it with imbibers.’ The US Department of Agriculture almost precipitated this kind of situation when it attempted to impose rules for labelling organic foods. The proposal drew a record 200,000 comments.

The problem was to work out whether it would be permissible to put the ‘organic’ label on such things as genetically modified foods, irradiated meat, and livestock raised under confined conditions. Kazman points out that for many people organic foods are a part of a lifestyle that has immense significance, on a par with religion itself. Under these circumstances private certifying agencies have sprung up, and Kazman suggests, who needs a state bureaucracy to blunder into the fray, unless it is content to be one among many certifying agencies? The virtue of diversity in this situation is that people can not only pick their chosen food, they can pick the agency that certifies their chosen food as well.

Wendy Kaminer, ‘The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools,’ The Atlantic Monthly, April 1998.

Kaminer argues that the schools and colleges for girls of a hundred and fifty years ago played an important role in the emancipation of women, but in modern times single-sex schools are more likely to hasten a revival of separate gender roles. The first female academies of the early 1800s were not designed to promote social change, although they did so by producing a rise of female professions and contributing to a mood of restlessness with domesticity. In the words of a president of Bryn Mawr ‘Our failures only marry.’

For a long time single-sex education was not really a matter of choice but by 1900 coeducation was becoming the norm. By that time more girls than boys were graduating from high school and in 1910, among the 1083 colleges of the nation, 27% were men-only, 15% were women-only and 58% co-ed. Since then more male bastions have fallen, with women even in the military academies. Still, there is a body of feminist thought which argues that co-ed schools are bad for the self-esteem of girls and discourage their aspirations, especially in science and maths.

Segregated schooling can only occur in the private sector in the US due to anti-discrimination law, and this situation has produced strange outcomes in some places where single-sex public schools have been attempted. In Detroit there was a proposal for three public schools for Negro males as a response to high dropout rates and other signs of low morale in that group. This was blocked by court action by feminists, civil rights groups and parents of girls in the public schools. A ‘dog in the manger’ attitude, one might comment. In New York the East Harlem Girls’ School has been more durable despite attempts by the usual suspects to close it down. It serves Latinos from poor families and its supporters have denounced the opponents as upper-middle class meddlers, out of touch with the needs of less affluent minorities.

Kaminer argues that the case for single-sex schooling ignores the anti-feminist ‘feminising’ that tends to occur in them, and is based on simplistic analysis of the outcomes of different systems. However it is hard to go past the notion that parents and students should be able to choose their mode of schooling, if the Supreme Court had not chosen to deny them the right to place their children in single-sex public schools.

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