#An education renaissance and other commentary

While many parents rightly wonder if their kids will “ever get an education” as teachers’ unions threaten “safety strikes,” David R. Henderson at The Wall Street Journal is “optimistic about the future of education” in general. When the pandemic ends, “many parents, perhaps millions, will have a new appreciation of how mediocre a job the public schools were doing.” Those schools are “dominant” only because a family “gets no tax break, no rebate” if it educates a child privately. With “public schools’ shift to online instruction,” though, many parents will realize “home-schooling works, on average, better,” while others will “push for an expansion of charter schools,” which “tend to be responsive to parents and can more easily fire poor teachers.” So: “Get ready. A school renaissance is coming.”

Conservative: Where Is the Freedom of Yesteryear?

“America’s cultural revolution” is using “fear to sweep through our civic, corporate and personal life” — and now, the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass thunders, it’s “coming for me.” The Tribune’s union falsely accused him of “religious bigotry and fomenting conspiracy theories” over a July 22 column that factually reported “left-wing billionaire” George Soros’ donations to “soft-on-crime prosecutors,” without any mention of “Soros’ ethnicity or religion.” Kass’ response: “I will not apologize for writing about Soros,” “I will not bow to those who’ve wrongly defamed me” and “I will continue writing my column.” The larger question, though, “is not about me” but rather “America and its young.” Do we want to pass on a culture in which “our American tradition of freely speaking our minds” is “swept away”?

Monetary desk: Biden’s Plans for the Fed

“Joe Biden wants to change the way the Federal Reserve is governed,” reports Bloomberg Opinion’s Ramesh Ponnuru. In a recent speech, Biden said the Fed should “aggressively target persistent racial gaps in jobs, wages and wealth.” The problem? “There’s no conceivable monetary policy that would set the differential between black and white rates of asset ownership at zero.” Yes, “monetary policy has an influence on racial gaps,” and mistakes the Fed made in 2008 — “signaling tighter money ahead as the economy weakened and starting to pay interest to banks on their excess reserves” — worsened the Great Recession, which “made the wealth gap worse.” But the Fed’s mission is to stabilize “the business cycle as much as possible,” and we wouldn’t want to change that “to reduce racial gaps.”

Herman Cain: A Truly American Dreamer

The late businessman Herman Cain “was a constant rocket ship powered by optimism, confidence and determination,” marvels Fox Business’ Charles Payne. “His orbit was the American Dream.” Payne “wanted to be a businessman from a young age” but “dreams need reinforcement.” He found his inspiration in Cain, whose career as owner of Godfather’s Pizza, Cain once said, “demonstrates that blacks can make it in mainstream corporate America.” In Payne’s “greatest moments of doubt,” Cain “came into my orbit and lifted me like a rocket.” While he rose “to superstardom outside of business,” at one point the favorite to win the 2012 Republican nomination, “Cain was always accessible and never changed.” That’s in fact why “he was propelled into the national limelight as someone that could do for the nation what he once did for an ailing pizza chain.”

Culture critic: A Brave Not-So-New World

Aldous Huxley’s “cerebral” 1932 novel “Brave New World” “lends itself poorly to the screen,” observes Francis X. Maier at First Things, but NBCUniversal’s new Peacock channel has tried. Huxley’s “ideas are obviously relevant today” but the latest adaptation fails to deliver its “sobering message”: “the despair of a human being who suddenly finds himself in a society of immense comfort but without sin, freedom, real danger, poetry, love or God.” Huxley’s dystopia is a world of “compulsory happiness,” with “resentments and discomfort” abolished “through genetic manipulation, social conditioning, drugs, free sex, erasure of the past and an ecstasy of consumer appetites teased and fulfilled.” But “if today’s street violence and political extremism serve any good purpose,” it’s to “remind us that humans have a chronic appetite for destruction,” even “the desire to vindicate ourselves by humiliating, or simply annihilating, others.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board