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PARTISAN REVIEW
It seems to me their basic function is to make money. There's a side issue
which is to improve their image when they're making too much money and
are resented for it. When the Fords and the Rockefellers and the Mellons died,
they contributed a lot of their money to essentially altruistic foundations, so
indirectly corporations or businesses function in an altruistic manner.You see
something like this in the theater. The difference between commercial theater
and non-commercial theater is very clear. Commercial theater is primarily in
the business of making money and every decision is made accordingly, which
is to choose your star, to choose the play you
think
is going to appeal to the
lowest common denominator, to stall the star's entrance until a certain point
when the applause will be loudest, to choose your directors, everything. The
nonprofit theater's purpose, at least in theory, is to
try
to make
art.
As a result
its function, its procedures, its practices are completely different, as they are
between university and business.
Rita Kramer:
A few minutes ago I heard a suggestion about education in
the earliest years of life. I thought there was a kind of slippery slope impli–
cation that institutions, government, corporations might handle this
problem. Nobody said the awful words "day-care." But I just want to put
on record that everything we know about child development, about how
human beings grow into civilized or civilizable people, suggests that the
earliest relationships in the life of an infant with a nurturing consistent
caregiver are crucial. A relationship in which the child learns that adults
are worth trying to please and that the world is a welcoming and forgiv–
ing place is something that can't be done by a village. It can't be done by
a day-care center. It can't be done by anything a corporation or the gov–
ernment can provide. It can only be in supporting policies that, in turn,
support the family structure.
Bernard Avishai:
About technologies of learning that take place after
the first five years of life. It's very important, I think, to distinguish
between the technologies of the Internet, of websites, and so on, and
those of the mass media. The skills that are necessary to navigate the
Internet are much more like the skills of using the public library than
they are of surfing with a remote control. The solution is not to give
everybody a laptop. That's like giving them a piano and telling them to
go make their living playing Brahms. These are not technologies that de–
skill you, that require your passive non-participation, but that invite a
tremendous amount of engagement and a high degree of Iiteracy. E-mail
is not a terrible thing if it gets young people to wri te letters, which it
does. Point and click is not a bad thing if you have to point and click your
way around what is in effect a vast catalog of potential research material,
