Nor, according to some educators cited by Ms. Hymowitz, in teaching them how to spell or do multiplication. Self-expression, you see, is more important than slavish adherence to the rules. So students write about their experiences in journals that are not, in any sense, literate. You can be a scholar or a total idiot. So one-third of the students at the nation's colleges require remedial instruction in reading, writing or math.
Kids do, however, get first-rate sex education, and they are able learners.
Ms. Hymowitz's accounts of the sex lives of American children are drearily familiar but no less alarming for that. It would be unthinkable to tell them not to. In the end, a society gets the children it deserves. An American society that has, essentially, decided to let kids raise themselves gets an MTV and Gap generation. If it is an adolescent's right to wear his Nazi regalia to high school, then we will get Columbine.