Geoffrey D. Dabelko

An Uncommon Peace

In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development set the sustainable development agenda with its report Our Common Future. To commemorate the report's 20th anniversary, Environment is publishing a 10-part series that updates this agenda. In a recent article, expert Geoffrey Dabelko writes a new chapter on environmental security, summarizing the successes and failures since 1987 and pointing us toward a sustainable path through environmental peacemaking.

How could we teach morality in the absence of God? This question has two minor implications. It first shows a lack of confidence among believers, as if they half know that faith is weak, and suspect that morality might also be so. Second, it insults unbelievers, as if we infidels might at any moment give ourselves over to slaughter and rapine. Beyond this, it suggests a sort of arid pragmatism. Faith has given some people strength, but is that enough?

In a brilliant and cutting essay, one of the wisest foreign policy analysts of our day tackles the myths and misapprehensions that have become synonymous with “neoconservatism”—and with the war in Iraq that, according to Kagan, it did not generate. Public expectations, the constants of American history, the requirements of world order, suggest that U.S. policymakers enjoy far less room to maneuver than one might think. This, as Kagan makes plain, has been the case for a century, maybe two.

A triumvirate of the most important plays of the 1940s, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (published 1940, produced 1946), and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1946), each has a salesman as its principal figure. Drawing on the cultural archetype of the salesman at a time when America was proudly emerging as the richest and most powerful country on Earth, Miller, O'Neill, and Williams exposed the contradictions (rather than merely elaborating the reasons) underlying the United States' apparent success.

Auwater and Arugete experimentally examine the effects of student gender and socioeconomic status (SES) on teacher perceptions. Results of a study of 106 teachers indicate that considering gender in isolation may oversimplify its effects. The interaction between gender and SES shows that girls have the advantage of higher teacher expectations only when the children are poor. Among wealthy children, the advantage is transferred to boys.

More than six years after the election of our current president, the nation is analyzing the effects of the No Child Left Behind federal legislation. Educators are discovering that the plan is flawed, developmentally inappropriate, ill funded, and leaving more students, teachers, and schools behind than ever before. Theoni Soublis Smyth offers a brief history of educational testing, delves into the debate of teaching to the test, analyzes the side effects of testing, and focuses on subgroups of school populations that are negatively affected by No Child Left Behind, specifically students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, minorities, students with special needs, and second language learners.

This article reflects on the authors’ experiences during a pilot year of an innovative core curriculum at a state research university and their attempts to create a “collaborative community” characterized by transformative pedagogy. It discusses their students’ and colleagues’ resistance to their inventive, albeit time-consuming and sometimes noisy, assignments. It analyzes the temptation to give in to bureaucratic inertia and return to an instruction paradigm that prioritizes the transmission of information over the more intensive goals of encouraging students to “claim their education.” Finally, they suggest that the development of collaborative communities of like-minded teachers is an important resource in mediating the conflict between transformative pedagogy and bureaucratic practice.

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