Sad to say, not everyone loses equally. Those who are the real losers are the students who need to develop skills for coping in the job market because those who need extra help are the ones most likely to get inflated grades rather than more training. Worse yet, those who aspire to escape the inner cities may have to attend schools which are physically the oldest and in which teacher turnover is the highest.

Further, in developing analytical stupidity and frustrating artistic ability, American educational institutions are highly one-sided in that they concentrate intensely on the verbal left hemisphere of the brain. As befitting a highly industrialized society, the abilities to focus on fantasies, ignore facts, misapply rules and massage data to confirm preconceived illusions are all cultivated in our classrooms and labs. Rather than being wellsprings of creativity, our schools and colleges are devoted to propagating acceptable answers to established questions. In the sterility of academics, everything is reduced to reason while being renders irrelevant.

In the world at large, leaders are often the worst students and quite reluctant to learn about and understand what they are doing. Mental stagnation at upper levels of government is as common as is supposed, since rulers usually strive to maintain intact the schemas with which they started. No less of a pundit than Henry Kissinger noted that leaders of state do not learn beyond their convictions. Experience may confirm beliefs or lead to minor adjustments of policy, but the mighty are ill disposed to learn they are wrong about anything. In contrast to our victory over Iraq, our government backed losers in China, Cuba, Vietnam and Iran in its commitment to demonstrate America's inability to profit from its losses for the sake of being itself.

Maintaining "Identity" can really be most stupefying, as demonstrated in Louisiana in the 1960's when local officials were proceeding with all deliberate sloth to integrate the schools. A proposal that integration be started in kindergarten and then proceed one grade per year for twelve years was rejected because it would work. The good ol' boys in power did not want a plan that would work; they wanted to be themselves. The only problem with "Being yourself" is that it can create so much difficulty for everyone.

Frank Serpico was just such a problem. He wanted to be a good policeman, which to him meant upholding the law. This made him something of an anomaly in New York City during the mid-1960's. Officer Serpico found that bribery, graft and extortion were such common forms of police behavior that cop after cop was encouraged by the prevailing norms to go on the take. In a department awash in its own arrogance, he

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