School Success Is Not Predicted By A

Every Morning, I Go Off To A Small Studio Behind My House To Write. I Try To Ignore All Email And Phone Calls Until Lunchtime. Then I Launch Into The Sometimes Frantic Busy-ness Of A Tightly Scheduled Day.

Educators, Long Disturbed By Schoolchildren's Lagging Scores In Math And Reading, Are Realizing There Is A Different And More Alarming Deficiency: Emotional Literacy. And While Laudable Efforts Are Being Made To Raise Academic Standards, This New And Troubling Deficiency Is Not Being Addressed In The Standard School Curriculum. As One Brooklyn Teacher Put It, The Present Emphasis In Schools Suggests That "we Care More About How Well Schoolchildren Can Read And Write Than Whether They'll Be Alive Next Week."

Like Secondhand Smoke, The Leakage Of Emotions Can Make A Bystander An Innocent Casualty Of Someone Else's Toxic State.

The Industrial Processes In Use Today Were Developed At A Time When No One Had To Consider What The Environmental Impact Was. Who Cared? But Making Ecological Concerns Matter To A Company's Bottom Line Will Help It Do The Research And Development That Will Reinvent Everything We Buy.

Societies Can Be Sunk By The Weight Of Buried Ugliness.