Land of doubts
Sir : In your issue of 22 December Patrick Cosgrave calls for a better understanding of French politics —may we hope that your New Year resolution will : be to bring about a comparable improvement in your coverage of the American scene. No doubt Ferdinand Mount's remarks (22 December) in de- fence of American health and education were well- intentioned; but you must surely realise that com- ment .which is ill-informed can contribute little to Anglo-American understanding at, a time when American issues are becoming more and more diffi- cult for the outsider to understand. It is no refuta- tion of Senator -Robert Kennedy's indictment of American medical care programmes as 'a national failure' to point to the quality of attention and treatment received • by the affluent middle class, when he is specifically referring to the provision made .for the poor and the elderly, who cannot afford the astronomical costs involved.
Similarly, the benefit derived by millions of imnrii- grants from the American school system is quite tangential to the arguments of Floyd McKissick and others. The sense of grievance felt by American negroes can -be located precisely in the fact that while, generations of white immigrants have been able to rise rapidly in American society, the negro has remained permanently disadvantaged: educated in segregated and largely substandard schools, where he will not even be able to acquire a tech- nical education that is on a par with its white equivalent. The problem is exacerbated by the blunting of ,purpose and ambition that comes with the sense of living in a predominantly hostile society, which proclaims equality in theory, but denies it in practice. In a modern democratic state education is among the most vital of all issues. Can we call a school system that fails to provide equal opportunities for black and white anything but a failure? And what can we do to prevent a similar
injustice over here? David Morse University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton
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