Pretty interesting arguments.  I hate to sound like a right-winger, but I think schools and government programs of all types should encourage marriage and not having children outside of marriage.  Even with all of the education, money, etc. that Susan and I have, neither of us could imagine trying to raise our three little rascals without herculean efforts from BOTH of us!

For Ms. Hymowitz, the two Americas do not divide between the poor who are supposedly in need of government assistance and the rest of us. The division is best defined in another way: between those who see marriage as an indispensable condition of child-rearing and those who don't. If we are becoming two Americas, it is one America in which parents are married and another in which they are not. The Marriage Gap, as Ms. Hymowitz calls it, appears likely to have a more profound effect on the future of both Americas than the gender gap so lamented by the feminists.

Despite the "unmarriage revolution" ushered in by the noxious 1960s, the anti-civilization decade, marriage is again flourishing among well-educated women. Today's educated mothers may work outside the home or not, but they and their husbands are committed to what Ms. Hymowitz calls The Mission -- the project of shaping their children into adults (and citizens) who have the requisite skills and self-discipline to prosper in a complex, postindustrialist society.

The Mission, notes Ms. Hymowitz, requires not a village but two married parents. And, no, cohabitation doesn't do the trick. Even cohabiters who have the education levels of their married counterparts are less effective as parents. "As the core cultural institution," Ms. Hymowitz writes, "marriage orders life in ways that we only dimly understand. It carries with it signals about how we should live, signals that are in line with both our economy and our politics in the largest sense."

That Ring Makes a Difference

By CHARLOTTE HAYS
December 13, 2006; Page D16

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116596720315348256-search.html

After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and introduced the public to the horrific sight of those desperate people in the Superdome, Newsweek headlined its coverage of the event "The Other America." The phrase was an allusion to the 1962 book by Michael Harrington that helped inspire the War on Poverty and perhaps also to John Edwards's "Two Americas," a book about American haves and have-nots that received far too much fawning attention during Mr. Edwards's vice-presidential run. Kay Hymowitz, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, freely admits that there are two Americas. But that is where the resemblance to Mr. Edwards's and Mr. Harrington's analysis ends.