HOW TO WORK TOWARD AGREEMENT

Impeccably intentioned, intricately organized, soberly thought out--Moorman's third earnest attempt to instruct the young in sane behavior is doomed by the impossibility of packing the wisdom of several disciplines into a useful and usable beginner's guide. An early section on factors leading to conflict ranges from ego needs to faulty assumptions and dogmatism to poor leaders; the final section, on ""Some Helps Toward Reaching Agreement,"" runs through a number of approaches--adversary system, arbitration, consensus, mediation, majority rule--but without building much on the highly compressed and abstract material that has gone before. In a middle section surveying history, science, philosophy, and politics as decision processes, Moorman notes at one point that ""language compels us to think in certain ways and not in others,"" and he explains elsewhere that historians, producing secondary sources, effectively determine ""what we get as history."" Both of these are important, valid, and even fascinating ideas to which whole books and courses are devoted (as Moorman points out, the latter is usually not encountered until late college), but they are hardly likely to light a spark at this level when so summarily treated. At best, depending on the teacher's talent and enthusiasm, this could conceivably serve as a course outline for an ""enrichment"" group.