A Christmas Carol is a kind of hymn, also embraces the institutions of the family and the business firm, within which individuals, through their mutual relations, endow their lives with meaning and humanity, making of themselves something more than animals with appetites or calculating machines with interests. This is a spiritual lesson, of a kind Roger Scruton explores further on page 82. Mankind, he says, must ease their plight or suffer grave consequences, and it can't be done without something of that spirit call it the spirit of Christmas that Dickens evokes. Merely providing the material means of ending Want turns out not to be enough. But at least Want of the starveling Victorian variety is gone from America.
Ignorance is another matter.
What's more, the schools' progressive-ed ideology has greatly harmed boys, in particular, as Janet Daley argues on page 26. She focuses on Britain, but her analysis is equally applicable to U.S. education. The hopeful news, though, is news that Sol Stern brings back from the voucher-supported schools of Cleveland and Milwaukee.