The Standard Reader

This is something of an old chestnut among education theorists. Leta Hollingworth, researching in the 1920s and 1930s, wrote that “in the ordinary elementary school situation, children of 140 IQ waste half their time. Those of 170 IQ waste practically all.” Margaret Mead found in a 1954 survey of U.S. schools “an appalling waste of first-rate talents.”

According to Genius Denied, things haven’t changed. The book is rife with educational horror stories: a five-year-old who attended Juilliard on Saturdays and had to clap quarter-notes in school the rest of the week; gifted programs centered around mythology instead of math; an eighth-grader who scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT but couldn’t gain early admittance to college.

This, charge the Davidsons, amounts to age discrimination. If a student can fulfill the college admission criteria, why not let him in? Especially when the alternative is several years in educational exile. “A school where a highly gifted student consistently scores in the 99th percentile but suffers through hours of boredom in class cannot claim it is leaving no child behind,” they insist, concluding that the smartest children lose a year of intellectual potential for every year they are left in a regular classroom.

Still, it’s a little hard to gin up as much indignation as the authors at statistics such as “special education receives twenty cents on the educational dollar while gifted education receives a fraction of a penny.” By their own account, IQs above 145 occur once in a thousand. Clearly, the number of children who can’t keep up with the class for whatever reason is much, much higher.

After reading how schools shortchange the gifted, you might expect to see the authors make a case for homeschooling. But it gets unaccountably short shrift here–strange, since half of the families who’ve worked with the Davidson Institute educate their children this way, and doubly strange after reading that “on any given weekday, 90 percent of America’s children sit in public school classrooms ready to absorb whatever ideology or social cause dreamers want to impart along with reading, writing and arithmetic.” Yikes.

–Susie Currie

American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy by John Harper (Cambridge University Press, 347 pp., $30). History may not repeat itself, but it can be pretty darn amusing. Alexander Hamilton once said, “Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness!” Hamilton wanted to build an American system “superior to the control of all transatlantic force and influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world.”

Today the tables have been turned and Germany’s foreign minister Joschka Fischer says that Europe needs its own Boston tea party. Who could deny that surging hormones for emancipation–and perhaps divergent interests–drive the European Union’s nascent foreign policy? If history were a guide to the pathology of these relationships, then Hamilton’s advice to the British might be relevant today for Washington: The surest way to secure a “permanent and happy union” was to allow the colonies “to be as free, as they desire.” That reminds me of a senior Republican strategist saying privately before George W. Bush was elected that it was time to let the transatlantic relationship breathe; that it would be better if America could cease being the “demander”–haranguing the Europeans–and become instead the “demandee.”

America’s relations with the old world are the backdrop to John Harper’s new book about Alexander Hamilton. Harper concentrates on Hamilton’s role in foreign policy. He also wants to set straight all those Jefferson lovers and the school of historians–John Ferling, David McCullough, et al.–who never gave Hamilton his due or, worse, gave him a place in history as the “manipulator and cad.” The twentieth century was surely Jefferson’s century. But that’s because of what Jefferson stood for–liberty and equality–not for what he actually accomplished, argues Harper.

The foreign policy legacy of Thomas Jefferson, writes Harper, is an ambiguous one. Jefferson’s message was America as the model of liberal values, on the one hand; but America as crusader with an active mission to reform the world, on the other. Jefferson’s legacy, Harper concedes, is no different: Realist consolidation and prudence are coupled with an “imperial temptation.”

In the end, though, Harper links Machiavelli and Hamilton neatly with his own worldview. Hamilton is the inspiration for those who want a U.S. foreign policy today “less grandiose and ideological.” Neocons beware.

–Jeffrey Gedmin

Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America’s Frontier by Shirley Christian (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 509 pp., $27). The West prior to the explorations of Lewis and Clark was not a pristine vacuum. The native tribes were sparse, but they were present, and since the seventeenth century both French-Canadian and British fur traders had been exploring the West in haphazard wanderlust. Meanwhile, the Spanish had made inroads in the Southwest by way of Mexico.

New Orleans, Detroit, and St. Louis were all founded as trading posts–St. Louis in 1764 by Auguste Chouteau (1749-1829), a fifteen-year-old wilderness prodigy in command of a party of settlers. The subsequent rise of the aristocratic and entrepreneurial Chouteau clan is ably chronicled by Shirley Christian in her new book, Before Lewis and Clark.

Their business influence in the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys was unchallenged, and Lewis and Clark’s arrival in 1803 found the Chouteaus living a life of “drawing-room luxury” on an otherwise primitive frontier. In a few short years the region had been governed by France, Spain, and finally the United States. The Chouteaus showed deft political skill in adapting to each change of the flag. The young American explorers were the recipients of both Chouteau hospitality and knowledge of the wilderness that lay ahead.

A nephew of the city’s founder–Auguste Pierre Chouteau (1786-1838) –became a major shareholder in John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, thus vastly increasing the family fortune. His brother, Pierre Chouteau Jr. (1789-1865), guided a further generation into both the steamboat and railroad business at midcentury. Shirley Christian has given us an intimate and lively look at a family whose influence was crucial in the settlement of the American West.

–Bill Croke

Tibet and Her Neighbours: A History by Alex McKay (Thames & Hudson, 240 pp., $27.95). A compilation of papers presented at the 2001 History of Tibet Conference in Scotland, Alex McKay’s Tibet and Her Neighbours: A History is at once esoteric and political. The twenty articles include Helga Ueback’s discussion of the Tibetan Empire during the Yarlung dynasty (seventh to ninth centuries). She mentions the celebrated alliance with the principality of Zhangzhung in western Tibet, supported by the marriage between its ruler and a sister of King Songtsen Gampo of central Tibet, who was the first to build a royal residence in what was later to become Lhasa, and himself took daughters of the Chinese emperor and the Nepali king as queens. Uebach confirms the Tibetan territory of this era as identical to the center of the area that is culturally Tibetan today.

Alexandre Andreyev examines Russia’s pre-1904 discussions with Lhasa, a pressing motivation for the 1904 British expedition into Lhasa led by Colonel Francis Younghusband. (Patrick French’s 1995 biography, Younghusband, is a good place to begin studying that epic march and its consequences.) Andreyev examines the long-held allegation that Tsarist Russian arms had made their way into Tibet by the early twentieth century, a prime factor in the British foray. It may have been optimistic of him to hope he would find evidence at this late date.

The “Great Game” was under way, and detailed portrait-quality photographs by Charles Bell, most dating from his residence in Tibet around 1921, are reproduced here in all their compelling mystery and beauty. Bell took office as the British head of mission in Lhasa after the Younghusband expedition; like Hugh Richardson, the British and Indian head of mission in Lhasa until shortly before the Chinese invasion of 1950, he was a tireless and sympathetic writer on Tibet. His rare photographs are highly valued as both art and anthropology, and these are no exception. Many are, in fact, more intriguing than those already published in Bell’s own books.

In 1991 Richardson wrote: “There were no Chinese troops and no officials [in Lhasa] until 1935 when a small party managed to get in. They were regarded by the Tibetans as an unofficial liaison office; and in 1949 they were expelled.” One can now find contemporary denunciations of Richardson on Chinese news websites. Roberto Vitale stresses the urgent need to “collect oral histories of pre-1959 Tibet while witnesses [are] still alive,” and Warren Smith has this to say on Tibetan national identity: “China’s current anti-Dalai Lama campaign . . . should convince anyone not afflicted with unrealistic hopefulness that the Chinese have no intention of negotiating with him. . . . The Dalai Lama may be excessively optimistic about the potential for the survival of Tibetan culture and identity” under Chinese control.

–Terese Coe