America's Social Revolution
By Melanie Phillips
paperback,
81 pages,
(September 2001)
ivitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society,
ISBN: 1-903386-15-2
Britain suffers from apparently intractable social problems: crime, family breakdown, welfare dependency and educational failure. None of our political parties appears to have any idea of how to break into these cycles of anti-social behaviour and low achievement. Although the United States suffers from very similar social problems, the debate there has been more open. Experiments with school choice have raised education standards; accountable policing schemes have reduced crime; and, above all, initiatives designed to shore up the two-parent family have started to win people back to the importance of marriage and traditional family life. Melanie Phillips visited America to investigate whether these schemes were having an effect - and whether it is possible to drag a society back from the brink of collective suicide. This book is the account of what she found there: the development of a social revolution.
