A Sober Bicentennial

Today - March 25th, 2007 - is the 200th anniversary of the passage of the Act of Parliament that outlawed the Atlantic Slave Trade. Within 18 months of the Battle of Trafalgar, and with 8 years of war still to rage on the European continent, the now undisputed naval superpower declared an intention to see the end of a trade on the high seas that had supported Britain's economy for hundreds of years. And, unlike many such initiatives, the intention was followed more or less adamantly. The Royal Navy appointed itself policeman of the seaways, and with force and treaty over many decades, set to the task of apprehending, boarding, searching, and if necessary prosecuting and hanging suspected slavers. At times, up to one sixth of the world's most powerful navy was devoted to the task of blockading the West African coast, to prevent the continuance of the Slave Trade. To my knowledge, this determined use of military resources in the enforcement of a humanitarian principle is unprecedented before or since.

This hardly makes amends for the evil of slavery in general or the Atlantic Slave Trade in particular, for which a formal apology from Britain and other nations is long overdue. Slavery throughout the British Empire was not abolished until 3 more decades had passed, and some argue that its final abolition owed more to Sam Sharpe's slave rebellion in Jamaica than William Wilberforce's persistence in the House of Commons. That one was decorated and the other hanged makes history's selective accolades even more sorrowful. Other European and American countries persisted in legalised forms of slavery much longer still. In Brazil, slavery was not abolished until the 1880's, and in Russia, the institution of serfdom persisted until 1859, one of a host of important reminders that the history of enslavement of one person by another is complex and insidious, and is not just an issue "black and white". Other countries were ahead of Britain - for example, Denmark abolished slavery and slave trading in 1798.

The situation in North America was much more varied than many people think. Non-Americans are often taught only that the United States came to blows over slavery in paving the way for a late emancipation in 1865, branding the USA as an kicking-and-screaming latecomer in this aspect of human rights. Though slavery is still sometimes described by historians as "America's birth defect", the history of slavery in the settlements that became the United States spans the whole period, and exemplifies some of the best, as well as the worst of the morality of the time. The Pennsylvania Assembly voted to penalise the slave trade with prohibitive taxes during colonial times, but this legislation was outlawed by the Government in London. After Independence, Pennsylvania and Massachussetts outlawed slavery as early as 1780, though even they were pipped at the post by Vermont in 1778. Since Vermont was at the time an independent republic, it retains the honour of being the first sovereign state in modern times to outlaw the practice of slavery. Similar honours are due to West Virginia, formerly part of Virginia, whose secession from the mother state at the outset of the Civil War was in rebellion against slavery.

The United States banned the slave trade on the high seas in the same year as Britain, two hundred years ago, but the fledgling US Navy lacked the means to prosecute the policy. Britain did much to harm the possibility of American cooperation, because of another endemic form of enslavement that the Royal Navy could not do without - the Press Gang. The terror of British ports, the Press Gang's job was to ensure that the Royal Navy had sufficient "recruits". For all its glories, the Royal Navy was an abominable place to serve, and recruitment to the gun decks depended on conscription. In the port cities themselves, this conscription often took the form of capturing merchant sailors who had drunk too much, who waking up on board ship at the pleasure of His Majesty may have had good reason to regret "the draft". On the high seas, the Navy assumed the right to board ships in the hunt for deserters. Given that many, if not most, American sailors at the time had at one time been, at least arguably, British subjects, and were hence prime suspects for "deserters", a clash was inevitable. If I knew the history better I might see other sides to the argument, but in the meantime, my sympathies with respect to the issues that led to the War of 1812 are wholeheartedly American. For decades to come, American ships were naturally suspicious of armed British boarding parties, including those who claimed to be arriving on board ship purely out of humanitarian concern.

Looking back to the issues that were so hotly debated in 1807, I see startling resemblance to political divides today. (Similarity, or "made in our own image" - who knows?) Abolishing slavery would be terribly damaging to commercial and national interests - at a time when the Enemy (at this time, the French) were ready to pounce on our every weakness. (William Wilberforce was actually decorated by the French Revolutionary Government for his efforts, which did his cause in Britain no end of harm.) Things were at least better for the slaves in the Caribbean than in the starving wilds of Africa, so it was humanitarian to transport them. ("If they weren't working in our factories, they'd be even worse off.") Given these typical objections, it is a marvel that the legislation to abolish slave trading passed Parliament, especially in time of War. The idea of the sugar industry being made to do without forced human labour was as prabably as unthinkable as the idea of many modern industries doing without fossil fuels. The idea of Africans deserving basic rights and freedom from exploitation was probably to some as outlandish as the idea that marine ecosystems should be accorded basic rights and freedom from exploitation today. But somehow, against all the odds and the economic practicalities of the situation, change did take hold, and with the simple hindsight of 200 years, we are of the confirmed opinion that anyone who supported the Slave Trade was clearly a self-seeking scoundrel.

The conservatives, then and now, had a literary heavy-hitter on their side: the Bible. The Good Book is clear in its support of slavery. It is carefully regulated in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. You have to set male Israelite slaves free after 6 years (not their families, and foreigners are fair game forever); you have to sacrifice in the temple if you rape one of your female slaves who turns out to be married or engaged (no penance required if the female slave is single); you shouldn't beat your slave to death (you can beat them, but if they can't walk again after 2 days then that's too hard). Even the New Testament, in its explicit statements about slavery, is largely supportive - St Paul exhorts slaves to serve their masters as we all serve Christ, and requests that his friend Philemon give him the slave Onesimus who has been a useful and devoted servant to Paul. Granted, Paul also made a few explicit statements that, under the Kingdom of Christ, there would be no distinction between free and bonded, Jew and Gentile - but that would be then, this is now.

But, as is well known, William WiIlberforce, the British Abolitionists, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, were deeply Christian in their motivations as well. They argued that the Love of God trumped all laws that sanctioned oppression - even Biblical laws; that the early laws given to the Hebrews may have been appropriate only in less civilised times; and that our understanding of right and wrong should be advancing, not fixed in tribal documents. For some Christians, "If parts of the Bible say slavery is right, then slavery is right." For others, "If parts of the Bible say slavery is right, then parts of the Bible are wrong."

There have been similar debates in the history of the Church, and it is being repeated today over the issue of homosexuality (the only substantial difference is that those who claim that the Bible is "incontrovertible" have picked different “incontrovertible” verses). The other side of the debate within the Church is also still with us - less vocal in the USA, but more than alive and well in Europe. They are the people who are involved in Trade Justice, Drop the Debt, and the Make Poverty History campaign. They include my parents and their friends, and I sill have a child's pride in what my wonderful parents do. They go to political events, they make banners and march in the streets, they bring the enthusiasm for justice back to their home town, they put on a host of events, they given people tea and coffee and cake and pamphlets, they host the Korean War Veterans, the Tank Regiment, and the Stop-the-War protesters under the same roof. They make people confront and talk about things that none of us really want to hear about.

Yes, we should make amends for slavery and other evils, but speeches and written words won't cut it without action. Unfair trading agreements, unfair prices for raw materials and labour, the Third World debt - these are the modern legacy of the slavery and the causes of slavery, and they must be thrown out.

We don't need to cast our eyes abroad to see the evil consequences of slavery. The evils of slavery are on our shores, and apparently are growing. An estimated 4000 women were trafficked to the UK in 2006, tempted by "family friends" or "boyfriends" to be trapped into sex slavery. Slavery has moved from the legal to the illegal sphere, but it persists. An estimated 10 million people were slaves in 1807: an estimated 27 million people are slaves today. In the meantime, the House of Commons has voted 8 billions pounds (over 15 millions dollars) to update our fleet of Trident nuclear submarines. It is hard to see how nuclear submarines can protect us against modern threats, let alone what role they have to play in pursuing the suppression of the Slave Trade to its determined end. As a diminished nation, perhaps the best Britain can hope for in the 21st century is that, if we are attacked by a handful of terrorists, we can destroy the cities they came from.

On this bicentennial, should I be proud or ashamed of Britain, the country where I was brought up, or of America, the country I seem to have adopted? I don't know, I don't think sentiments of pride or shame really hurt or help either way. But there are some lessons I'm willing to draw from this.

We have a natural tendency to make excuses for the way we harm to our fellow humans, and we have developed a huge machine that enables us to hide from these harmful realities.

Religion motivates the best humanity has to offer, and sanctions the worst.

Laws are only the beginning. Committing the will, the resources, and the persistence over decades to see them through is what counts.

Bringing about change for the better involves long uphill struggles to change opinions, win hearts and minds, make sacrifices, compromise, take it a bit at a time, three steps forward and two steps back. But great changes are possible, they have been wrought before.

Within 200 years, the moral imperatives of an apparently complex situation will be distilled down to blinding simplicity.

The only way we can ever hope to make the future better than the past is to act in the present.

---

Sources: There were a number of very useful sources for this essay, written and word-of-mouth, along with many dates half-known and half-remembered. I was writing this in Cincinnati airport, so didn’t have access to sources, and it’s now late at night. Please write to me if you want corroboration of any of the facts and figures I have cited, and I will retract any that turn out to be wrong and qualify and that turn out to be misleading.

Some useful and interesting articles are available at the following websites:

BBC panelists
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/6474225.stm

Biblical quotes and some analysis
http://www.religioustolerance.org/sla_bibl.htm

Antislavery
http://www.antislavery.org/

Wikipedia article on abolitionism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism

Some Naval History
http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/discovery/themes/lane.navy.html

Royal Naval Museum
http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/visit_see_victory_cfexhibition_infosheet.htm

Keeping up with life in Pittsburgh

Walking into the main Carnegie Library in Oakland, next to the Universities, the Phipps Conservatory, and a 400 acre park, one can't help but be reminded that Pittsburgh abounds in the basic necessities for high civilization, and even better, it's right on your doorstep. Or rather, to be more exact, it's about 5 minutes drive from home and 7 minutes drive from work. Right on our doorstep, opposite the Spanish immersion elementary school, is the other 400 acre park, where Rolo happily snuffles every morning and fondly imagines that some day he has a hope of catching a squirrel, a bunny rabbit, a chipmunk, or a deer. So far he hasn't come anywhere near, though he has got himself lost in the woods a couple of times trying, given up, and turned up back home several minutes before his chapperone stops calling for him in the park. Which is always a completely harrowing several minutes, as every dog owner knows. Fortunately Rolo only crosses one road on the way, and has absolutely no chance of getting lost on the way back. As well as a symphony, ballet, big theatre district, respectable art and natural history museum, and the National Aviary, all within a 12 minute drive, we also have waterfalls, white water rafting, forests, falling leaves, skiing and snowboarding within an hour's drive. In the spring, for a month or so, the city blooms like no other I've ever lived in. Cherry, apple, dogwood, and many others that one day I'll photograph and publish somewhere online so that flower lovers who would never have dreamt of visiting can put Pittsburgh in their calendar.



By now the blossoms have given way to leaves and fruits. We're very lucky to have a cherry tree in the garden, and the cherries themselves are now turning from green to pink to red. Hopefully there'll be plenty to share with folk for a few weeks. We've also been working on bookshelves, plastering, painting, rewiring, planting flowers, and generally way too many things to do at once, especially since in the past two or three months I've been travelling to England, France, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and a trip to Maryland. As well as some chance for holiday, there has been a lot of travel to present some of MAYA's work to communities that are interested in what we're doing, sharing information, reusing resources, merging and combining information in the biomedical domain, building smarter devices, smarter networks, and all that good stuff. If anyone's interested, there are a few papers at my local MAYA webpage, and there will probably be more to come. And if you're more interested in the house projects, here's a picture of the bookshelves (and Rolo and me).



So, as usual, there's a millions exciting, harrowing, predictable and surprising things happening in the world and at home. I just thought I should scribble something down, and for once I thought I should skip politics, science and religion and write about a couple of the things I concentrate on in real life.

Oil and Coca

The front page of the BBC website was interesting on Wednesday (which gives some idea of how busy I have been in the meantime).

The main story was the tragicomical spectacle of George Bush urging the USA to reduce dependency on foreign oil. Rather like the pyromaniac who's burned the street down finally accepting that fire is dangerous and the community should invest in fire extinguishers. So finally, the Republican Guard is accepting that the streets of Baghdad aren't full of cheering Iraqis draping American flags from every lamppost, the price of oil is sky high, and the war is not going to pay for itself by improving the oil supply - quite the opposite (in contrast with the rosy picture presented to us before the war began, that it was going to cost $60 billion payed for by Iraqi oil, whereas the current cost is some $400 billion and counting).

It's probably too late to turn around the American Imperial machine, as real events since the speech have demonstrated. More money for the war in Iraq, specifically for military expenses not reconstruction, hikes in US defense spending across the board, and cutbacks everywhere else. According to friends and former research collaborators who receive funding from the military budget (there are many defense research programs in the USA), those cutbacks are eating into information systems research. I don't recall the 9/11 report recommending that resources be diverted away from information integration programs, nor stating that the reason for the 9/11 attacks was that the USA wasn't spending enough money fighting insurgents in foreign countries - nonetheless, that is the priority that has been set by the current US administration. The people who could implement the overhaul of information infrastructure recommended by the 9/11 commission aren't receiving the necessary funding - they're afraid of losing their jobs to pay for Iraq. Compare the State of the Union address with tomorrow's budget and make your own judgment. (There a preview on MarketWatch here.)

Sadly, that's all very predictable. We will remember this regime as the one that spent the USA out of global influence, both fiscally and morally. Many may rejoice. I don't - as a traditional European social liberal, I have a lot of bones to pick with the USA, but I would still much prefer US hegemony to Chinese.

However, a much more interesting story was about legal coca growers (you can find the story at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4623350.stm). Since the election of Eva Morales in Bolivia, himself a former coca farmer, there has at last been some interesting debate and awareness raising about the role of crops in the "war on drugs". The article describes the varied uses of the coca leaf for making drinks and medicine, just as the hemp plant has been used for centuries to make rope and textiles. There are many farmers worldwide trying to build a living out of the legal and beneficial uses of the coca plant, instead of using huge amounts of it to make small amounts of cocaine.

If we can just make the right connections between these coca farmers and the right markets, we can bring a variety of great new products to consumers and cut the narcotics out of the business. The two main enemies of this strategy are of course the drug barons and the (somewhat ignorant) drug warriors. As with the global "war on terror", and almost every other conflict there is, the warriors on both sides would much rather have the war continue than to face the challenge of peace.

Having lived in Bolivia for a time, I have some good experience of the coca leaf - my Bolivian host once heard that I had a stomach ache and literally stuffed some into my squeamish Western mouth, and within a few minutes the stomach ache went away. It's quite a miracle - it seemed to cure both constipation and diarrhoea with equal effectiveness, don't ask me how.

Needless to say, us prissy western Christian kids were terribly worried that we were getting hoodwinked into "taking drugs", whereas our hosts had no idea what the fuss was about and of course, thought we were refusing hospitality and saying that their plant wasn't good enough for us, while we were obviously suffering from ill effects that the plant was known to cure in many cases. It was an interesting situation, as you can imagine, and it will surprise none of my readers to hear that, for me at least, the "conquer evil by force of will and force or arms" rhetoric of Cromwellian Protestants was soon quietened by the humble but wise coca plant.

Some of my teammates had a little more difficulty letting go of the rules, of course, but we had very different attitudes on a range of topics and the positions we chose on the coca leaf debate were very predictable.

"You should pray to God for relief from your stomach ache."

"I did. God heard my prayers and gave me coca leaves."

Of course, this idea is many world's away from the way the USA has traditionally fought its "war on drugs", fighting violence with violence, because overmonied idiots in the USA encourage tons and tons of perfectly good coca leaves to be condensed down to mere grams of cocaine so they can get high, do dangerous things, and damage their health. Just as you can distill large amounts of grain to make small amounts of whisky, which we all know to be a dangerous and harmful substance.

Imagine that the year is 1760 and the whisky problem in Britain is getting out of hand. And suppose that it's easier to sneak a barrel of whisky into England than to disguise the cultivation of a grain and the nearby distillery. To prevent the uncontrollable surge of illicit whisky across the Atlantic, the Redcoats start marching around the American countryside burning grain fields, on the grounds that the British, the world's most sophisticated people and the champions of liberty in the modern world, can't be trusted not to use all that healthy grain to get horribly drunk, act violently, and go blind. Sadly but seriously, this is very much how the American "war or drugs" has been perceived in Bolivia, and with good reason. It doesn't sound like such a good policy when you try and put the boot on the other foot, does it?

So, thumbs up to Auntie for publishing such a jolly good article on its international frontpage. And if there is any unifying theme to this little essay (except that the source articles both appeared last Wednesday), could we please in future try to connect some of the dots before we decide to go to war? It might even be more profitable.

A Vote for Gulf Coast Relief is a Vote for Arctic Drilling?

I probably should not be surprised by this, but I am. There is an important vote / fillibuster / lobby / pantomime expected in thhe US Senate soon, on a bill that seems to

i. allocate billions of dollars to defence spending
ii. part of this includes relief and rebuilding for the Gulf Coast
iii. there's something about fuel subsidies for the cold weather, to sweeten the pill of
iv. cutting billions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid

and there's

v. an Alaska Senator seems to have got Arctic Drilling onto the same bill.

The story I read is here. I may have confused some of the seemingly crazy array of issues that have been rolled together into one story, though it sounds like the US Government has done this for me.

I gather that US history is rife with crazy bills where different politicians insist that they'll support a bill for one thing, provided that their constituency gets another. But seriously, a vote for winter fuel aid and rebuilding the Gulf Coast is a vote for Arctic Drilling and cutting Medicaid? Is this really the will of an educated, enfranchized and free people? Sounds more like an arcane medieval theocracy to me.

In other news, I've laid hardwood floors throughout our ground floor, built a baker's wrack, been sealing the house, making pieces of banister rail, coat hooks, finishing wood furnitred, and learning to use all kinds of tools that I'd never even heard of. Just in case you were thinking that all I ever do is moan about conservatives who couldn't even conserve a jar of marmalade, I wanted you to know that in fact, I devote very little time to politics and a lot more to home improvement! I will hopefully post pictures of some of these projects on the internet, many readers may find this more interesting than my sporadic political rants.

Truthfulness and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Amongst the to and fro about the war in Iraq, I read this morning about Dick Cheney's condemnation of those who would complain that the governments of the USA and the UK were deceptive in the way they led us into war. Many excerpts from the Vice President's speech can be found here. By now, the Republican Guard is on the defensive, in a predictably offesive fashion. It's worth noting that everything I read in the transcript of the Vice President's speech is arguably true - but whenever a politician follows a statement with a phrase like "those are the facts", the people should probably be extremely sceptical.

What has happened (Dom's personal expert analysis, don't confuse this with "facts", folks) is that the past two years have seen a shambles in Iraq, more and more reports of deception and twisting of public opinion in the run up to the war, the scandal of Abu Graib, the Katrina disaster, clearer and clearer signs of China's rise (this will be about China's 6th rise - the main thing China can teach the US is the virtue of staying power), as the US spends its way into the honourable club of once-great empires, and the slow but perceptible fading of September 11th 2001 into the perspective of history.

Back in 2001 and 2002, the Republican Guard successfully whipped public opinion into war frenzy, with the traditional goads of indignation and fear - get the people angry and frightened, and war becomes the only patriotic decision. I clearly remember the run up to the Iraq war. As war became more inevitable, the question wasn't "will it happen", but "will you stand with the majority?" At the time, Maryl and I didn't. We, and thousands of other people in America, joined hundreds of protests, stating as firmly as we could that we were being misled, that we were being foolish, that in spite of September 11th 2001, going to war in Iraq was not just wrong, it was stupid. Even from close friends and family, we faced shocked questions like "Surely you're supporting the troops?" To which we always said "Yes, we are. Are you supporting them by sending them off to the wrong war for a made up reason?" Oh, how marginalized we were. Had we been Democrat Senators, our political acumen would doubtless have warned us off such foolish idealism in the face of public opinion.

Now, some of the Democrat Senators are finally coming out and saying "we were wrong to go to war, and the administration was wrong to lead us into war". Thanks for speaking out, guys. Now that Bush's approval rating is about one third of the Amrican people (and lord knows what on a worldwide scale), those brave Democrats are coming out and saying that the whole thing was wrong.

So the Republican Guard was decisive but evil and stupid. The Democrats were either wrong, or if they were right, they were too spineless to say so, and now they're trying to capitalize on the fact that public opinion was swayed. And, I've said it before and I'll say it again ... the do-gooder peacniks, the liberal academics, the soft-hearted fools who took the time to read histories of the middle east and the history of previous "wars on terror" ... well, they were right all along.

No WMD, 2000 US soldiers and uncounted Iraqi civilians dead, no sign of the Al Qaeda leaders, the moral high-ground of Western Democracy in tatters, habeus corpus suspended (so long as the administration promises not to torture people).

What are the finest aspects of Western Civilization? What are we going to do to preserve and enhance them? Who will lead us?

Three Years in Guantanamo for the Crime of International Satire

As ever, when I haven't written a weblog article for months, it's not because there isn't much going on, but because there's so much going on at home and in the world that I really should be making more time to write. Hopefully there will be some catch-up postings soon. However, my immediate reason for scribbling a quick article today is because my cousin Andrew (who is from Trinidad and has lived in Barbados, the UK, and is now in Canada) drew our family's attention to the following article:

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wobadr094492447oct31,0,1261
> 397.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines.

The article asserts that two writers from Afghanistan were incarcerated in the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison for three years, because they were handed over to the US military with the accusation that they had publicly encouraged the assassination of President Bill Clinton. If you read the article you'll find that Pat Robertson's incitement to crime against Venezuela were much more serious, but he's American, Christian, white and rich, so of course he got off with a round of mild public rebuke.

Just a couple of days later, the UK Parliament voted down the Blair Government's plans to increase to 90 days the time for which police can hold terrorists without charging them with any crime. Even though this would still have been a mere snip compared with the astonishing "3 years and counting indefinitely" which the United States has chosen over the ancient writ of Habeus Corpus, that is no standard for any self-respecting country that claims to hold freedom dear. I am delighted that our representatives in parliament are standing up for the ancient rights that made our culture worth defending in the first place (and that the MPs for Halifax and Newcastle were among the Labour "rebels" involved in this defence).

Anyway, my main reason for putting this brief posting together was so that my family could hopefully add some of their insights as comments. Some of the discussions over e-mail (from the USA, Canada, the West Indies and the UK) have been very thought provoking, and I hope that some of them will appear here in due course!

Newtonian Gravitation is just a Theory, too

The past couple of days have been pretty busy, not only for myself personally, but also for every other scientific pundit who has been working overtime contributing their own views on whether evolution in the United States is an established fact or a dangerous distraction from the serious business of promoting Christianity. What with everything else going in, I have not had time to gather many of the promised quotes demonstrating Darwin's own sympathies with the idea of nature as the tireless designer of the species of the earth, so instead I'll post a couple of thoughts about what others have written more recently.

One of the most interesting is the stance of the school board from Dover, Pennsylvania. No, not Kansas, but our very own PA, the home of Benjamin Franklin (discoverer of electiricity in the lightning bolt), and of the writing of the American Declaration of Independence. In a similar spirit of seeking discovery and questioning misplaced authority, the schoolboard of Dover has apparently ordered that a "disclaimer" should be added to the teaching of Evolution. You can find a sympathetic discussion of the disclaimer in this article, which is honest enough both to reproduce the entire text and to admit that this is only a first step towards the proper goal of teaching history from the book of Genesis.

The beginning of the decalaration to be read to students in Dover reads as follows:

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Rather than expressing outrage, I think most scientists could heartily endorse the spirit of scepticism expressed by the Dover declaration. After all, people (especially the media) are all too willing to encourage the public to swallow "science" without sensible questioning, and without distinguishing theory from fact. For example, "thing tend to fall downwards" is a fact. "All objects in the universe exert gravitational influence on all other according to their mass and to the inverse square of the distance in between them" is a theory, and only an approximate theory at that. Perhaps the Dover educators will extend their scrutiny of the curriculum to add the necessary disclaimers before the theory of Gravitation is taught to students. In fact, as soon as the school board gets down to business properly, they will discover a host of assumptions and incompletenessed in many other scientific theories that have been parading as truths for far too long, and I trust that the board will be willing to continue down the path of intellectual emancipation that it has so nobly begun.

Fortunately, our high school students are deemed too unsophisticated to be inculcated into the deeper mysteries of Quantum Theory and the Theory of Relativity, otherwise the list of cautions would probably take longer to read than teaching the theory itself. But these should at least be mentioned, otherwise students may be taught about the electric motor and the electromagnetic spectrum without realising that Faraday's and Maxwell's theories were, again, just theories, and relativity and the quantum theory have plenty to say in improving both of these. But there may be ample opportunity to teach the Copernican Theory of the solar system, and in this case the arguments for the Geo-centric Ptolemaic Theory and the Flat Earth Theory should be presented, at least to enable students to make up their own mind. Of course, the idea that humans are heterosexual and monogamous may be just a theory, but I wonder if it's even that general - the Bible certainly presents alternatives, and our children should probably be exposed to these and left to choose their own path. The modern value given for pi is deduced from the mathematical theory of complex analysis, and students should be told about the Biblical value of 3 as well.

Imagine the intellectual honesty that could result from a society where children are actively encouraged to question the things taught as scientific fact in less enlightened places. I should keep an eye on developments in Dover, if they encourage so much open-mindedness, I might be tempted to move there for the sake of my children's education.