Here is a video of the Jackson 5 performing the song “Never Can Say Goodbye” on The Flip Wilson Show. The song came out in 1971, and the catchy melody and little Michael’s vocals made it a chart-topper and an enduring hit. (Other singers and groups recorded the song in subsequent years.)

But there is something fundamentally wrong with the entire situation. It bears upon a problem I’ve mentioned before (see here). Consider two elements in the video.

First, the lyrics of the song.

“Never can say goodbye No no no no, I Never can say goodbye

Even though the pain and heartache Seems to follow me wherever I go Though I try and try to hide my feelings They always seem to show Then you try to say you’re leaving me And I always have to...

I took a quick trip in the car an hour ago and flipped on the radio. I went through Fox News, two CNN channels, two NPR channels, and CNBC, and each one talked up the Jackson “situation” (that’s the best word I can think of). Yesterday, a local AM news outlet reported that Al Sharpton has called for a postage stamp of MJ. The LAPD expects some serious challenges with crowd control at the funeral, but Staples will garner $65-75 million dollars in advertising exposure during the ceremonies. One woman lucky enough to procure a ticket spoke on the air of watching “history” being made.

I have no opinion about Michael Jackson or about his music, and the neutrality makes the hoopla and broadcasted emotion a mystery. Why all the publicity? Why are people so eager to step to the news microphones to amplify the personal, the deeply personal, meaning of it all?

Listen and observe for a while, ...

With climate-change legislation working through Congress, conservatives and liberals have more or less lined up on predictable sides to oppose or favor, but historically the divisions haven’t been so neat. Indeed, one wonders why conservatives gave the environmentalist movement over to liberals and the left during the 1960s and 70s.

For there is a long strain of conservatism that aligns well with environmentalist thinking. It might be termed the “agrarian” lineage, the thinking that favors the yeoman farmer over agribusiness, the small businessman over the factory owner, the village over the city, and small capitalism over big capitalism (so to speak). This version of conservatism claims that capitalism in its largest forms — the corporation, conglomerate, monopoly, investment bank — breaks down local customs and breaks up families, destroys traditions and fosters rootlessness. It...

One of the biggest problems in undergraduate education today is the so-called “disengagement factor.” Academic disengagement happens when students enter college, go to class, and complete assignments, but in a desultory manner. They don’t work as hard as they should, they blow off morning classes, and they don’t interact with their teachers outside of class. In the 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement, for instance, 38 percent of first year students “Never” met with professors outside of class to “discuss ideas from readings or classes,” and 39 percent only did so “Sometimes.”

A study due to appear in Social Science Research contributes an interesting finding to the problem. It’s by Susan A. Dumais, and it’s entitled “The Academic Attitudes of American Teenagers, 1990-2002: Cohort and Gender Effects on Math Achievement.”

Dumais takes data from the National Education...

Here we have two pieces in the press, one an op-ed column in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Bob Barr and another a story in The Nation magazine by Sasha Abramsky.

Who ever thought that the man known as the social conservative attack dog in Congress in the 1990s and the most prominent organ of the left would come together? That says something about the War on Drugs — namely, that it’s absurd.

Barr never really deserved his reputation as a culture warrior in the 1990s, a profile he acquired during the Lewinsky Affair because he appeared on late-night television shows several times a week (it seemed) to debate defenders and rationalizers of the president. (In my view, the scandal was a great big distraction, and a...

Something troubling happened in the public schools in 2006. From 1996 to 2005, the high-school graduation rate increased by an average of close to one-third of a percentage point annually. But from 2005 to 2006, the figure dropped more than a full point. Here is a map of the states, from EPE Research, and you can see that the full variation from state to state reaches 35 percentage points. (Here is a story in Education Week on the trends.) The breakdowns by race and gender, too, are sometimes striking.

Here from Common Core is another report that has an interesting finding. It compares the curricula of some high-performing nations around the world to those of the United States and...

Texting is much in the news these days, especially after Nielsen released its finding that teens send and receive an average of 2,272 text messages each month. The New York Times reported on the phenomenon, as has The Washington Post, Scientific American, and a thousand blogs across the country.

Texting even has entered the realm of competition, with the LA U.S. National Texting Championship offering $50,000 to the winner. This year it was a young lady from Des Moines (see here), a 15-year-old who runs up 14,000 texts each month and advises parents, “let [kids] text during dinner! It pays off!” More than 250,000 tried to enter the contest this year.

It’s not all social stuff, we are assured. One thing the winner does is use texting to...

Here is an interesting little newspaper piece out of Rapid City. It’s in the Rapid City Journal, and it reports on budgets and usage in the district middle-school library system.

The headline is “Rapid City middle schoolers may be reading less,” and the prime measurement in the article is book checkouts. In the last year, it says, “middle-school students checked out about 30,000 fewer books.” One librarian calculates the reduction as 10 books that didn’t get into the hands of each student in the area.

The librarians have no trouble pinpointing the cause: budget reductions. After the Rapid City board of education cut $4-million from the district’s operating budget, the library system restructured. Middle-school libraries closed one day per week, and the amount of money devoted...

Here at City Journal, the lively quarterly of the Manhattan Institute, Sol Stern has an essay on the influence of radical education theorist Paulo Freire on higher education in the United States. Deep in the essay it refers to the Modern Language Association as “ultra-politically correct,” a characterization common among conservative and libertarian critics, but one that, I think, misconstrues the political opinions of MLA members.

It is more accurate to say that the MLA is composed of more or less left-of-center folks, most of them moderate liberals but with a few ultra-left factions in operation, including the Radical Caucus. Yes, there is ample room for various racial and sexual identity preoccupations, but for people who want to do traditional literary scholarship that doesn’t invoke left-wing themes and go...

The commentary on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s speech at Berkeley’s School of Law in 2001 and published a year later in Berkeley La Raza Law Journal has proliferated in recent days, and at this point the White House regrets those 32 words (“I would hope that a wise Latina woman …”) as much as anyone.

Of course, as many have pointed out, the identity-perspective statements are not something to shy away from, not, that is, when one speaks them in academic settings. They are, instead, customary sentiments. When Judge Sotomayor uttered them at Berkeley, I imagine that few noticed them except in terms of approval. Indeed, to me what stands out in her disquisition is how routine and unimaginative the presentation is, the defense of identity-based understanding mostly a series of standard expressions.

We have some unobjectionable, common-sense assertions that people’s experiences color their...