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No, this is not a classful of prodigies. Gordon begins by going over the results of a test on the Genesis account of the Fall and the myth of Pandora's Box. She is not pleased with her students' performance.

"Why did Eve eat the apple? It was not because the apple was pretty, as one of you wrote."

Gordon cajoles the students, teases them, and occasionally commends them, calling on them frequently by name (always prefaced by "Mr." or "Miss"). Clearly they love her.

The class proceeds to Aristotle. They are working on his famous account of the nature of tragedy, and this session is devoted to reviewing the key terms, with a good deal of reading aloud and reciting definitions.

At this level, Gordon explains after class, the goal is to teach the students the basic vocabulary and analytic tools they will need to understand tragic drama. By the time they are seniors in high school, they will be able to employ these tools with great ease.

For the 7th-graders, she keeps the lesson simple, concrete, and fast-moving. The fall of a "man of noble birth"? Yes, President Clinton, guilty of hubris (and never mind that his birth was rather humble; he attained a high estate): "He thought he was above the moral law." But then another example: "When he arranged the Watergate break-in, President Nixon thought he was above the law, too. That's hubris."

Established in 1995, Logos is one of thousands of schools, large and small, founded by evangelical Christians in the past 30 years. In 1960, when traditional Catholic parish schools were still going strong, evangelicals overwhelmingly sent their children to public schools. Today, a generation later, although a majority of evangelical children are still educated in public schools, a significant minority is attending Christian schools or is schooled at home.

In part this change came in response to the ongoing crisis in public education, the dimensions of which have been widely reported. Twenty-five years ago there was a fierce debate about the state of America's schools, spurred by reports of falling scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Critics traced the decline to changes made in the 1960s under the banner of "progressive" education. Defenders of the schools said that the fuss over test scores obscured the big picture: in fact, they said, public schools were better than ever!

Today it is much harder to find anyone taking that rosy view. President George W. Bush has said that education reform will be the top priority of his administration. Measures of student performance in the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics continue to be bleak. In Chicago's schools, despite more than ten years of expensive and highly publicized reforms, just over a third of the students read at grade level. Violence in the schools is on the increase; in New York City schools, reports Robert Kolker in New York magazine, sex attacks have tripled in the last decade. Nor are such woes limited to big-city districts; consider the wave of shootings in schools large and small, suburban and rural.

On top of these concerns, there is an acute shortage of teachers. "Who Will Teach Our Kids?" asks a Newsweek cover story, adding that "Half of All Teachers Will Retire by 2010." Right now, today, schools across the country are desperate to recruit qualified teachers—or at least a few live bodies.

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May 21 2001, Vol. 45, No. 7