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Up Close and Personal
ON MONDAY MORNING, the teachers file into a dining room at the National Press Club for breakfast and to listen to conservative speaker Ron Robinson, president of Young America's Foundation, criticize big government.
"Government's track record has not lived up to its promises," he says, cataloguing problems that persist despite government efforts -- from homelessness to the disappearing family farm to crime in the District of Columbia.
  (Scott Robinson) Washington Post Magazine
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When Robinson asks for questions, government and economics teacher Pasternak raises his hand. "I understand your argument about government not living up to its promises," Pasternak says. "What do you do when the markets don't live up to their promises?"
Robinson responds that the financial markets succeed best "where they are unregulated by government."
"But my parents can't afford their health care," Pasternak counters.
Robinson understands, he says, that many teachers disagree with him, but they owe it to their students to also present conservative views. At week's end, Pasternak will say Robinson was the most effective speaker, because -- agree or not -- he presented his positions so well.
The teachers get a dose of liberal politics over lunch with Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist turned full-time "peace studies" educator and activist.
McCarthy, who teaches at Washington area high schools and colleges, describes himself to the group as "a pacifist and an anarchist."
"Like the lefties in Oakland, right, Mr. Pasternak?" he says, with a nod to the Oakland contingent's table.
McCarthy names three female pacifists whom most in the room have never heard of: Emily Balch and Jody Williams (Nobel Peace Prize winners) and Dorothy Day (a Catholic activist for social justice).
"Why do we know all the men who break the peace and not the women who make the peace?" he asks.
After taking questions, he signs his peace studies books. The Oakland teachers line up, but the supply runs out. Fuchs gets an e-mail address to order a book and expresses the hope that McCarthy will personally deliver his message to the students back in Oakland, which had 148 murders last year.
