David Richardson

Quite - it shows that there is some point in having this kind of 'idealistic' legislation on the books. On a purely utilitarian basis, it probably has no effect whatever for a couple of years … but over time it changes the parameters within which people think, in this case to make violence against children unacceptable. Another effect is that legislation like this often provides people with an 'alibi' to behave well. They've just installed speed cameras on a stretch of local road and it's done wonders for the people who want to keep to the speed limits - even though they've only installed the boxes, not the cameras.

It's fairly easy to divide your list up: Not OK: hitting, smacking, assault, groping, beating, punching, chastising, thrashing OK: patting, caressing, stroking The main point has been over the years that if you remove physical punishment from your list of things you can do to children, you have to find other ways of dealing with the conflicts that inevitably arise when people come into contact with each other, especially when one of them is big and strong and the other is smaller and physically weaker. One of the mechanisms Swedish schools have for dealing with disruption, bullying and other forms of physical and mental violence is the class and school council. Pupils get involved in the running of the school from a very early age (Class 1 - 7 years old), and a lot of the work of avoiding the kinds of situation where some kind of physical chastisement happens in other countries is done by pupils, teachers and parents working together. Parents also have access to a range of different support groups to help them avoid ending up in a situation where children get hit. The mechanism involved here starts with the myriad of parents' groups you get involved in in conjunction with pregnancy and the birth of children. One revelation for new parents is that the system is much more geared to the mental and physical health of the child than of the parent, although people have begun to put more effort into making sure that parents can cope. The main effect of the law that's been in force now for 30 years or so is to put physical punishment beyond the pale. The spin-off effects of this stand on principle have been generally beneficial (Sweden as a society definitely isn't breaking down). Of course children are still abused by their parents here, but the cases have been reduced to the 'pathological' cases, which are picked up on very quickly. A local case this spring involved someone who gave birth at home without medical attention and refused to attend the post-natal clinic, for religious reasons. When the child was 12 months old it developed severe eczema and the parent took the child into the emergency clinic. The child was found to be severely malnourished (the only food intake was breast milk) and was taken immediately into care. However, now that the case has been reviewed and the child is healthy again, the care order has been revoked, on condition that the parent accepts the help and support that is available. The point of this case is that it was so unusual that it made national headlines and was discussed in the papers for weeks.

It was the lack of a choice of words which has been so important to Swedes - they don't make a distinction between one kind of physical assault and another here. And it's many, many years since the last time a child was killed by its parents whilst they were chastising him.

I heard on Swedish radio this evening that the House of Lords has just amended the law on beating children in the UK in a way which allows the practice to continue. The way they described it here was "you're allowed to beat children, provided that you don't leave any marks". Physical violence against children was banned her about 30 years ago. What do people in the UK think about the continuation of this practice there?

Interesting comments, Andrew. As a language teacher I've long known the absolute necessity of using a variety of ways of taking something in, if the student is going 'own' the language I'm trying to teach. I have a lovely quote in Danish from a leading educationalist there which translates as "knowledge is something which each individual creates within herself". I.e. we can teach and teach until we're blue in the face, but someone else's learning is something we have very little control over. Dr Dunn and her team's research into learning styles (http://www.learningstyles.net/) also has interesting things to say about the limitations of text-only ways of taking in new information. I was at a conference about learning styles in Sweden a couple of years ago which was addressed by Dr Dunn. One of her comments in particular made a great impression on me. She said that although we all have certain learning styles which we tend to adopt, the point of education is to help people to become more proficient in the learning styles which don't come naturally to us. If she's right, then it doesn't mean that we have to swing the pendulum away from text-based learning styles over to something else, or to spend hours trying to create diversified lessons dedicated to all the different learning styles our pupils happen to have. IM hasn't really taken off in Sweden, as such. It's a bit unnecessary in a country with the kind of mobile phone coverage that Sweden has. 3G phones are the big fashion accessory here at the moment. We're at the stage where the companies are giving them away free if you sign a 2 year contract (at about £17 per month). Here's a paragraph from an article I'm writing for a US publication at the moment: "Text-based communication definitely has its uses. However, I am not yet convinced of the advent of homo digitalis – digital people – who have evolved away from spoken communication. Synchronous text demands very highly-developed typing skills, if you are going to participate fully, whilst asynchronous text requires you to be able to formulate your ideas precisely … in just the same way that we don’t when we speak. In other words, what if our current dependence on text-based communication is a temporary phenomenon, brought about by the limitations of the medium, on a par with the telegraphese which developed in the 19th century to limit the expense of a communication medium where you paid by the word? (ASAP – as soon as possible – is one of the remnants of telegraphese.) If this is the case, then what I am calling the preferred method of most human beings will reassert itself as soon as technology permits – just as speech came back into its own as the telegraph was superseded by the telephone. And that is just what technology is on the verge of permitting."

I've been (well) out of the UK school system for more than 20 years now (i.e. I left long before OFSTED). I'm fascinated by the depth of (bad) feeling OFSTED seems to evoke, though. What do OFSTED inspectors themselves feel about their bad reputations? Are there any OFSTED inspectors reading this Forum who could tell me themselves?

Third Wave Education In my view, just as the second wave needed to retain something from the first wave (i.e. first wave mathematics was just the same as second wave mathematics - it's just that lots more individuals needed to be able to do calculus or long division), so the third wave is retaining some of the characteristics of the second wave. What I think is happening is that we're now able to give the individual a kind of first-wave treatment (the study of the Oxford don is a typical first-wave environment), but on a mass, second-wave basis. The means we can use to do this is with IT. So, for me, third wave education is collective and collaborative (as is the classic product of the first-wave, which we call something like western scientific thought), but no longer restricted to an elite which controls sufficient economic resources that daily life is more than a constant struggle for survival. At the centre of this process is a very second-wave machine - the computer - which can be used for second-wave ends, such as control and standardisation, but also for third wave ends, such as collaboration. The thing I find fascinating is that the results of an enormous investment in second-wave uses of IT (such as most government- or industry-sponsored educational software development) have been extremely modest. Or, to put it another way, a nearly complete waste of money. My explanation for this is that the whole intention of holding back the development of third-wave education is doomed to failure. It would be like spending your resources designing a better sack for the sowers to keep their seeds in as they distribute them by hand, rather than embracing the seed drill. It'll be interesting (for me, at least!) to hear what other participants think about this line of reasoning. So far as I know, it's just ideas that occurred to me (usually whilst making the long journeys through the Swedish countryside you have to make to do distance teaching here). It wouldn't surprise me, though, to hear that it was all thought out years ago, by someone else!

This post isn't about a teaching strategy as such, but more an attempt to identify some underlying trends which I think are shaping our teaching and learning. Alvin Toffler developed the idea of a Third Wave of development of advanced societies way back in the 1970s (The Third Wave, ISBN 0-553-24698-4, came out in 1980). His idea is that the first wave was the agricultural societies of the period from the Bronze Age until the 16th/17th centuries. The second wave was the mass societies created by the Industrial Revolution, and the third wave is the niche-based societies created by the Information Age. I don't know whether Toffler is right, but as computers came to be used in education, I started trying to understand the developments we're going through by applying Toffler's model to education. The first wave (agricultural society) for me is characterised by Socratic dialogue. There you are on the Agora in Athens, questioning the ideas of anyone who happens to come by, in this the centre of the intellectual universe (I'm often tempted to see the Web like this!). The fact that your existence is supported by a vast army of women and slaves doesn't even occur to you. However, within your elite group, there is a form of collective intelligence at work - problem-based learning taken to an extreme, perhaps. During the first wave, the masses didn't need any education at all - they knew how to grow the food, and to keep in their place. However, with industrialisation, suddenly the masses needed to 'know' a bit more - such as to count, to read signs and even to turn up on time. I remember reading the diaries the first state school teachers were obliged to keep, during the 'golden days' of the Victorian era. Most of the entries were complaints about how the kids would just disappear from school if there was something else going on (harvesting, a local fair), and how the parents would come round and beat the teacher up if he complained. Second wave education is all about control, breaking down the social networks which sustained agriculture and cottage industries, and about standardisation - the 'right' answer is the same one, the one that's in the teacher's book. In other words, the characteristics of industrial production are the same as the characteristics of the education system - just as they were with agricultural production in the first wave. So what is third wave education? I'll put my ideas in the next post, since this one has become quite long!

Here's another idea which is also a re-post from Cooperative Learning: Jigsaw Learning Let's say you have a boring chapter in the book about London. Well, you find three other inputs about London, and then write five comprehension questions about each of the four inputs. You then jumble up the questions and make a worksheet, an OHP, or just write them on the board. You then divide your class up into groups again, in clusters of four. Give each group in each cluster a different input and ask them to answer the questions which relate to their input. This is often trickier than it sounds, because they have to decide what *isn't* in their input as well as what is. Then you get each group to pick a presenter (just like in the New Products exercise), and send the presenter round to the other groups. Their job can be either to tell those groups the answers her group has found (the easier option), or to ask them what their answers are (more time consuming and with greater potential for disruption). When the presenter returns, there's another information-sharing moment, after which the teacher can check whether there are any questions (which there nearly always are, since different people interpret questions differently). --- One aspect of this exercise is that you can use it, even if there are students of different abilities in the class. I remember once doing it with a demonstration class of 10-year olds for some of my teacher trainees. The four inputs were the chapter in the book, a map of the London Underground, the AA Guidebook to London, and a short text I wrote myself. One of the groups were high-flyers, who'd been spending their time making snide comments about the weaker pupils. They got the AA Guidebook. The weakest group got the map of the Underground, and the other two groups got the texts. No-one could tell from the questions how easy or difficult the input material was (easy questions on hard texts and vice versa), the weaker students got a task they could do (for once) and the stronger ones were stretched (for once).

This post has already been shown in the Cooperative Learning thread - John asked me to re-post here. Here's the first idea: The New Products Exercise You divide the class up into groups, which are clustered so that there are four groups in each cluster. Each group gets a description of some new invention (taken from New Scientist, Newsweek, or a trade paper). I usually hand out one description between two, so that the students are already cooperating as they read. Each group has a task of producing a visual aid which a presenter from that group can use when he or she goes round to the other groups to tell them about their invention. The visual aid contains three things: a name for the invention; a sketch of it; and a one-line slogan. If we were talking about a famous brand of Irish beer, the visual aid would say "Guinness" at the top, in the middle there'd be a picture of a bottle of beer, and at the bottom it would say "Guinness is good for you". When the visual aids are ready, the group picks a presenter and lets her try out her presentation on the home group. Then it's time for the presenters to go to each of the groups in their cluster to present their products. Traffic control is important at this stage: I usually give the presenters a timed 2 minutes, and no-one is allowed to go on to the next group until I say the word. The 'listeners' have a job to do too: when their presenter makes it back 'home' she will know about one invention, but they will know about four. So the final stage, when the presenter returns home, is for the rest of her group to tell her about the other three inventions. ----- You get reading, writing, listening and speaking. Everyone's involved all the time. And the teacher is in the background nearly all the time, available to help and guide. I use this exercise with engineering students, but it could easily be adapted to any subject where there is factual input to handle.

This is the problem with monarchies, isn't it. Even when royals are making valid points, their identities just get in the way. If Charles had attended state schools himself, and if his children had, there would be fewer problems about taking what he has to say about them seriously. I actually feel sorry for him as a human being. What a life it must be to wait around, fairly uselessly, until your mum dies, in order to have anything like a life.

Distance learning is a large part of what I do too … although when you get going, you soon find that the boundary between distance learning and campus-based learning is more there in theory than in reality. I work at a Swedish högskola (a bit like the old UK polytechnics) in Kalmar, in southern Sweden. If you find the long, thin island just off the south coast of Sweden, Kalmar's the town on the mainland opposite it. We serve a geographical area about the size of England, from Motala to Finspång (both towns up towards Stockholm), down to Falkenberg to Emmaboda (both towns just north of Skåne, the last county before Denmark). We use a mix of technologies and methods, partly depending on the pedagogical requirements of the particular course, and partly depending on what's available. There's an extensive network of study centres in our region, and we can use their level of technology as a base line for our students. In other words, an individual student doesn't have to have a particular programme or particular computer, since these are available at the study centre down the road. The study centres get their funding from various sources, and we have to adapt our course delivery to this. So far we've used ISDN video conferencing extensively, since many of the centres were getting EU funds for this. As this funding dries up, we're going over to using IP-based video conferencing, which doesn't allow us to address groups at a time, but it doesn't cost the centres anything like so much. Some of our courses are entirely web-based (Business Writing is a case in point), and many of them include students who are way out of our geographical area, in places like Abu Dhabi and New Jersey. We commonly use Internet tutors to mark send-in tasks and to give individual help to students. The team have been working together since 1996 and currently consists of tutors in Australia, New Zealand and Spain. We pay them 25 euros per hour (gross) at the moment, and they are hourly-paid teachers at our college on the same basis as the locally-based ones, except that they don't pay tax in Sweden. The findings of the survey which started this thread are exactly in line with our experience in Sweden. The Swedish government is explicitly using distance education to bring in non-traditional students. The 'profile' of a distance student in our area is a woman in her 30s, with two children, a steady job, a steady relationship and an established life in a local community. Sweden's always been big on 'second chances' in education, so there's a widespread acceptance that your educational qualifications are going to have to 'adjusted' a number of years after you left full-time compulsory schooling. The problem is, of course, that it's very easy to formulate the broad general goals, but a whole other thing to realise them! The Swedish Net University was set up a couple of years ago to try to coordinate efforts in net-based distance education. Most of their site is in Swedish, but you can get to the English pages by going to: http://www.myndigheten.netuniversity.se/ and clicking on In English. Their latest scheme is something called 'Librarian on Duty'. The idea is that a distance student can chat with a librarian in real time in the evenings to get advice about what kind of books she needs for a particular essay. During the day, the student can get advice via e-mail. The service is shared out between a number of different universities, so that each place has a particular evening when their librarians are on call. This is what I call a bit of essential infrastructure for distance studies.

I'm afraid my reaction is a big yawn … and not because I'm one of the uninterested public educators. I'm sure that you can 'teach' subjects by computer and turn out pupils who've passed all the standardised tests. The problem is that pupils like that don't usually know very much! I had a colleague a couple of years ago who taught physics (and was, incidentally, extremely interested in computer-aided teaching). Whenever he was lectured at by one of this kind of guru about what computers would do for physics teaching, he'd ask "where's the swimming pool?" When the guru looked puzzled he'd say "well, I like demonstrating the Archimedes principle by leaping into a swimming pool and have my students do it too. Can computers provide us with that experience?" What I think this blog entry demonstrates (under the guise of modernity) is the age-old question about what education actually is. What Brennan is advocating, in my opinion, is Gradgrind's 'fact-based' education. Charles Dickens demolished that argument pretty convincingly in the middle of the 19th century …

Yes, I think this is a very British debate! It's very difficult to imagine a Swedish school objecting to what pupils wear, unless they were breaking the law about wearing political uniforms (i.e. no swastikas or brown shirts) or something like that. I'm convinced that politics has a lot to do with it. Right up until the day the Germans lost WW2 a large part of the Swedish ruling class was very 'Prussian' (and pro-Nazi). Their social customs were very stiff (you'd address a married woman as "Mrs Engineer Eriksson" or "Vicar's Wife" - that's Fru ingenjör Eriksson or Prästinna in Swedish). The social effects of Social-Democratic rule didn't manifest themselves until the 50s and 60s. Nowadays dress is casual (but neat and expensive since Sweden's a rich country) and women only wear skirts and dresses if they want to. I've got a colleague who wears a tie to work, but he's widely regarded as eccentric! 'Businesslike' in Sweden is seen as a capacity for getting things done, rather than as a particular style of dress. I remember visiting the Tax Office when I first came to Sweden and being seen by a bloke in jeans and a T-shirt, with his feet up on the desk. He was the manager, and he gave me some very useful advice about reducing the amount of tax I had to pay! It makes life in general much easier, and schools avoid a lot of the wearing conflicts about clothes a lot of British schools seem to suffer from.

And, to take up a theme from the thread on Reagan and the Left, if you just recreate the oppression the Russian Revolution fought against, sooner or later another group of revolutionaries will arise and fight against that too. The idea that the state the post-Communist countries are in is somehow permanent is as daft as the idea that the capitalist countries' state is also permanent. I was watching a 60-minutes slot on the decreasing mileage gained by SUVs in the face of a coming shortage of oil. A car buyer in a small town in the USA was asked whether he would be interested in sacrificing a little bit of performance (say, 0-100 kms/hour in 10 seconds, rather than 5) in the interests of better fuel economy. "Nope, this is America and this is the lifestyle we have here". Well, that's true … until the oil runs out! The wide-scale looting of the Soviet economy and the general decline in the living standards of the population since the fall of Communism is bound to cause a reaction. The only question is what is going to influence that reaction. It was a tragedy that politicians of the low stature of Bush (the first) and Thatcher were in power when the Iron Curtain fell. What they signally failed to do was to 'sell' Western ideas of democracy and human rights at the same time as they sold Western ideas of raw capitalism.

I've just been looking through the contributions to this thread, and I'd like to go back to the difference between oral and written communication. In 'Roots' Alex Hailey relates how he came across Kunta Kinte in the first place. He'd gone to Liberia (I think) and found a village where people thought that someone with that name might have come from. At a village meeting the 'history-teller' comes forward and starts reciting the story of every single person in that village, going back several hundred years. Kunta Kinte's story, in the 1700s, was part of that. So … we human beings definitely have the capacity to keep a lot of information in our heads! I've recently been using a desktop video-conferencing system, which makes it very easy for people to link up, see each other and talk to each other, at a very low cost. The most interesting effect has been to see how much more lively and full of vitality the exchanges on that are, compared with written contributions on fora like this one. OK, there are plenty of people like me who have the interest, and patience, to formulate our ideas, put them down whole in written words, and then wait days or weeks for responses … but we're the weirdos! Most people aren't like us! I'm always telling IT-freaks that computers will really start making an impact when we can get rid of the keyboard, but the ability to put people into fairly instantaneous contact with each other, no matter where they happen to be, is a good start.

What an uninteresting speech! Still, it shows the depth of self-delusion among right-wing thinkers. In my view, it all comes down to power. The right in the US have the power and they have consistently used it to reward the rich and punish the poor. They gained that power by systematic campaigns of oppression against political opponents, mostly so long ago that most people haven't heard of them (do these names - taken at random - mean anything to you: Eugene Debs, Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe Hill?). Now they control the political discourse in the US, so that 'left' comes to mean the Democratic Party! I was trying to explain Swedish politics to a group of visiting Americans last year, and we ran into a really interesting conundrum. One of the parties of the right in Sweden is called the Liberals. But, hold on a moment, isn't a liberal a left-winger, said the Americans? Not in Europe … When there is a truly free and diverse media in the United States … When opposing points of view are given equal media time and attention … When American pupils are given the same sort of education in how their society runs as Swedish pupils get … When all the eligible voters are registered to vote automatically … When constituency boundaries are no longer gerrymandered to produce the right result … When the turn-out for US elections is comparable with the 80+% that is normal in Sweden … When the system of counting votes is as fair and unimpeachable as the ones we achieve in Europe … … and the US still elects right-wing politicians like Bush and Reagan, then I'll believe in Reagan's ideas about the "tide of history". What his ideas really reminded me of was O'Brien's explanation to Winston in 1984 of how the Party seized and maintained its hold on power. A prescient book, that, and, for me, the idea that Orwell was writing about the Soviet Union is about as far wrong as you could get.

I'm not trying to say that legislation alone is going to be the answer either. Of course there'll be a need for a lot of 'remedial' work to counteract the influence of the junk food producers. My point is that pupils are not making 'choices' about what kind of food to eat and what kind of lifestyle to lead in a neutral environment. Rather it's an environment where the suppliers of junk food have got massive propaganda resources, and they're able to exercise a great deal of control to limit the pupils' access to certain types of foods (how many fruit vending machines are there is schools, compared with fizzy-drink vending machines?) and promote others. There's a problem with obesity and junk food in Sweden too, but it's nowhere near the problem in the UK. There are still very strict nutritional standards for school meals (which are free, by the way, and often include breakfast as well). Pupils just don't know what 'packed lunches' are, since everyone eats at school. Physical education is integrated into the curriculum at a very early age, as are lots of other types of outdoor physical exercise (there are even some day nurseries for pre-schoolers, where the kids spend most of all day, every day, summer and winter, out of doors). One of the items on this evening's news was the shock-horror story that five out of a thousand 11-year olds can't swim, and what are we going to do about that? It's an integrated system, where strictly-enforced nutritional standards, access to open countryside and properly-controlled physical education are all essential factors. The system would almost certainly break down without at least the first and last of these factors.

I suppose we're going to have to read a considerable amount of the re-writing of history in a while about Mrs Thatcher too. What I find interesting is the lack of self-confidence the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals seem to have about their own ideas and 'achievements' in office, as shown by the sheer lack of reality of many of their comments about what Reagan did in office. There's a very good article in today's New York Times about Reagan's economic policies by Paul Krugman, for example (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/opinion/11KRUG.html) which, for me, systematically demolishes all the guff about Reagan's policies being so good for America. There's a delicious piece of irony in Sweden in a recent government appointment. Bo Lundgren, the former Conservative leader, was Minister of Finance in Carl Bildt's 1991-1994 Conservative-led government, and presided over the usual (for neo-cons) massive increase in government debt to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Lundgren has just been appointed as head of the government department responsible for managing and reducing Sweden's borrowing on the world financial markets … Would that this happened more often.

Makes me think of Dr John Snow and the Broad Street Pump. Here's a link: http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/broadstreetpump.html but I bet John Simkin's got something about it on Spartacus. I'm sure that the 'widow in Hampstead' would have thought that it was terrible that the authorities stopped people from drinking from her favourite pump, the one she'd sent across London for the water from because she thought it tasted so good. She didn't think that, of course, because the same water had already killed her. At the risk of being accused of polarising or taking things too far, I'd say that the current exposure of schoolchildren to junk food is of basically the same nature as the exposure of the inhabitants of East London to the raw sewage that had leaked into the Broad Street well. Junk food doesn't kill you quite as quickly, and more people exposed to it survive, that's all. Perhaps the Victorian era was different … but the way we achieved our current society where people don't die of cholera regularly was via intervention from the nanny state. If we'd left it to the private sector, the Victorian network of sewers and water pipes wouldn't have been built. What makes me say this is that the network is just beginning to break down now, not having been maintained and repaired properly by the private sector during the 'golden days' of the 1980s and 1990s.

The nanny state gets up to all sorts of things, like preventing me from exercising my right to drive on the right-hand side of the road when I visit the UK! The question for me is not whether there are going to be controls or not (obviously there are going to be), but rather what kind of controls they are going to be, and who is going to decide over them. The idea that there's a 'free choice' in a situation where millions are spent on advertising to shape children's preferences for particular kinds of foods (the unhealthy ones) is, at least, naive. At the same time if you hand over a service like school meals to the private sector, without imposing strict controls, the law of the free market will tend to result in them offering worst possible service they can get away with without actually losing the contract. And since the contracts are not awarded by parents or children, it's not immediately obvious that providing nutritionally awful food is a negative factor.

In a sense what we're trying to do in our corner of Sweden is to create some kind of eU. Our approach is incremental, though, and uses existing technology and methods as much as possible. We're in the business of 'sucking it and seeing' too, and of exploiting each new technological advance as it comes along, rather than trying to technology innovators and educational providers at the same time. I'm not saying that our approach is superior to that of UKeU … but we're still around!

I listened to a presentation of UKeU by Jonathan Darby at the Net Learning Conference in Sweden in 2002. I thought at the time of the old Irish joke about the English tourist who asks a local how to get to Limerick. The answer is "If I was going to Limerick, I wouldn't start from here." Fancy starting to create an on-line university by writing a platform programme! (And why not listen to the Open University, who were arguably already doing the job of delivering higher education on-line). I've been an interested observer of this kind of project for many years now. When the Employee Investment Funds were abolished in Sweden in 1994, the then Conservative government put the millions of kronor into closed trusts (largely staffed by their supporters), one of which was specifically designed to encourage IT development. When I'd seen the almost total divorce from reality of many of the projects this particular trust funded, I came to the conclusion that such things were really supposed to divert money into particular people's pockets, rather than to actually achieve their stated aims. I coined a term for such things: spips (stands for Something Posh to Impress the Punters). It makes life much easier whenever someone higher up starts getting enthusiastic about IT in education. We just have to find out if they're talking about something real, or just a spip. If it's a spip, you know you only actually have to produce the front page - the rest can be blank!

One of the main problems I have with US retention of power in Iraq - which is what I think we're really talking about when we use the term 'limited sovereignty' - is that it probably isn't going to work! By this I mean that 'limited sovereignty' isn't likely to bestow upon Iraq a peaceful, stable and law-abiding government ('democratic' is perhaps too much to hope for). The occupation seems to lack legitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqis, which means for me that any 'government' the Americans sponsor is also likely to lack legitimacy. If I'm right, then the choice is between chaos soon or chaos later … with later chaos being on a much larger scale than earlier chaos. But that's what you get when you try the imperialist option, isn't it.

Let's also remember how the Iron Curtain actually fell. I'm writing from memory now, but I think it went something like this … In the summer of 1989, Hungary opened its border to the west, and Czechoslovakia followed suit. This enabled thousands of people to leave the satellites in the East for the West, and put immense pressure on East Germany, since East Germans started leaving for the West via Czechoslovakia. This, in turn, created the conditions in which the on-going East German protests against the authoritarian Communist government *weren't* immediately repressed by force, especially since Gorbachev made it very clear that the Soviet Russian forces in those countries would not be available for repression of the local populations (as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968). … and then the whole apparatus of Communism collapsed like a card house. However, let's celebrate one or two other people, such as Helmut Kohl, who seized the opportunity to re-unite Germany (in the teeth of the opposition of such politicians as Margaret Thatcher), which thus created a new 'map of Europe' into which the former satellite states could fit. Let's also celebrate the Balts who seized their freedom from the hands of Russians wanting to keep them in the fold. I think that there were plenty of Russians who saw the post-Communist Russia as continuing to include the Baltic States, and their independence has undoubtedly caused a lot of difficult for Russia. This is not to deny that the USA had a lot of influence too … but I think that these 'future historians' are much more likely to see the end of the Cold War as a 'home-grown' phenomenon.