I thought I'd written something about this but I must have pushed the wrong button. What I wanted to say is that I think this is an excellent use of the forum. One of the most interesting and worrying things I've found since moving back to teaching history after 20-odd years teaching in the elementary school is the level of political illiteracy amongst the students I teach. I didn't expect 14-year-olds to have a very firm grasp of dialectical materialism or anything, but many of the 18-year olds, who can, after all, vote, have only the very flimsiest concept of the ideals of the parties which are vying for their votes. I think this is a failure of the way we teach history, and of the lack of emphasis schools (and educational administrators, governments, etc) put on the teaching of history...

I'm afraid I can feel another Iran anecdote coming up -- sorry about that! A few months after the Islamic Revolution, I was at a small, rather nervous party with a group of Iranian "liberals". One of the men there had been the Minister of Housing in the short-lived Bakhtiar government which was overthrown on Khomeini's return. At one point in our chat, he said, rather plaintively, "Who would have thought six months ago that it would all end up like this?" I felt like saying that ANYONE who'd studied the French or Russian Revolutions would have been able to predict with some accuracy the rapid slide into extremism which followed the revolution in Iran. I didn't because it would have been pointless. The Shah had prohibited the teaching of either the French or Russian Revolutions in schools because he felt it might give people nasty ideas...

Keep up the good work, Andy. This is a very useful project to which the forum lends itself beautifully...