Heidi Alexander: “last week Templeton Press published an important new book, ``How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for…”

“last week Templeton Press published an important new book, ``How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow's Schools.''edited by the Fordham Institute's Michael J. Petrilli and Chester E. Finn, Jr., and published by Templeton Press. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the preface I wrote for the book. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: Reforming Education the American Way: State by State, Community by Community I was participating in a humdrum educators' roundtable in Buffalo, New York, in 1988 when ``Monk'' Malloy, president of the University of Notre Dame, asked this question: ``What is the purpose of a public school?'' There was a long silence until finally Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, proposed this answer: ``The public school was created for the purpose of teaching immigrant children reading, writing, and arithmetic and what it means to be an American with the hope that they would then go home and teach their parents.'' The reason to read this book is to judge for yourself whether the twenty-two conservative luminaries who wrote its chapters have produced a better answer today to Malloy's question than Albert Shanker did thirty years ago. Shanker was a patriot--an old-fashioned, anticommunist, Hubert Humphrey--liberal Democrat union organizer whose parents had immigrated from Poland.…”