What Do You Think, Mr. Ramirez? : The University of Chicago Press : 9780226480787 : 022648078X : 31 Oct 2017 : Geoffrey Galt Harpham&;s book takes its title from a telling anecdote. A few years ago Harpham met a Cuban immigrant on a college campus, who told of arriving, penniless and undocumented, in the 1960s and eventually earning a GED and making his way to a community college. In a literature course one day, the professor asked him, &;Mr. Ramirez, what do you think?&; The question, said Ramirez, changed his life because &;it was the first time anyone had asked me that.&; Realizing that his opinion had value set him on a course that led to his becoming a distinguished professor.             That, says Harpham, was the midcentury promise of American education, the deep current of commitment and aspiration that undergirded the educational system that was built in the postwar years, and is under extended assault today. The United States was founded, he argues, on the idea that interpre