conceptions of education implicit in the battle over busing and more explicit in controversies over school prayers, in broader discussions about the place of religious instruction in the public schools, and in the general conflict between the demand for schools responsive chiefly to parental pressure and the demand for schools governed by an abstract ideal of "excellence." Malloy took the position, in effect, that the first of these conceptions would simply enforce uncritical adherence to local dogma, while the second would allow a few gifted individuals to escape from their culture into the business and professional class, leaving the rest behind.

Advocates of busing argued that racially integrated schools would destroy racial stereotypes and promote tolerance. Their more ambiguous effect is illustrated by the case of Vinnie, the only student in Charlestown willing to submit to busing into Roxbury during the first year of the desegregation program. Held up as a model of racial enlightenment in an account of the busing crisis by Pamela Bullard and Judith Stoia, Boston television reporters, Vinnie might better have been seen as a model of social mobility and cultural expatriation. As Martha Bayles noted in a perceptive review, Vinnie was a hero for Bullard and Stoia because he was "just like us."

Unlike his backward and ignorant neighbors, he wants to go to Harvard. Unlike his insular neighbors, he intends to leave Charlestown and never come back.... Unlike his sexually repressed neighbors, he sees no harm in unmarried girls having babies.... The point is that Bullard and Stoia, in their zeal to show how busing has cured Vinnie of racial prejudice, show also how it has cured him of numerous other beliefs and values. Instead of describing a Charlestown boy who has overcome racism, they describe a Charlestown boy who has overcome Charlestown.

Unfortunately for Judge Garrity's experiment in racial balance, most of Vinnie's neighbors did not share his ambition to "overcome Charles‐

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Fine Arts in Roxbury, said that "all we want is a chance for black students to sit with white students ... and learn." "It sounds so simple," Malloy noted without conviction.

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