About a decade ago, Arthur Schlesinger wrote a book titled The Disuniting of America. A highly respected liberal thinker and an eminence in the liberal political orbit, he had come out against an orthodoxy of the new liberalism. The orthodoxy, now more entrenched by habit than by conviction, was "multi-culturalism." No longer e pluribus unum. But "out of many, more." Popular though the book was and well-reviewed too, I'm afraid it was ignored in practice. The multi-culturalists won. Wherever one looked there was evidence of the erosion of national feeling. And the erosion also of the conviction that one could be at home anywhere from sea to shining sea. When I was a young civil rights activist that was what I thought was our purpose. As soon as the sit-downs happened at lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, Michael Walzer and I and a few other friends, then all living in Cambridge, founded a support group, EPIC, the Emergency Public Integration Committee. It made a mark actually. But that's another story. All of this came to mind again when the controversies about the Arab-focused New York City school, named after Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese Maronite writer of soporific but unoffensive verse, and then, more recently, the Hebrew-centric school in Hollywood, Broward County, Florida, where Al Gore had been screwed out of votes that would have elected him president. These schools--and probably others with other fixations elsewhere around the country--are malignly conceived. If Arabs or Jews want their children to learn the tongues of their ancestry and their history, too, let them have communal institutions communally owned and communally run. These need not be a substitute for public schools. They can be held in the afternoon or during the weekend. (I spent all my growing-up years in public elementary and secondary schools. Since my parents wanted me also to get a Jewish education--intransigently secular, as it happened--I also went to a Shalom Aleichem Folk Shule.) Or they can be organized as day schools (there are dozens of Jewish day schools all across America), but neither sponsored nor funded by the public till. Separatism should not be sanctioned by government. There is something demonic in the expectation of the mayor's blessing for an institution that so self-consciously veers away from the national creed. Anybody who wants to be separate go and be separate...but, when you want to, be separate on your own. Actually, I think of myself as an exemplar of this model. The not-yet opened Gibran charter school (which was heralded by Intifada tee-shirts) and the Ben Gamla school (of which charter replicas are planned in Miami, Los Angeles and New York) are conceived of as separatist institutions.