The thoughtless slaves become the thoughtless slavers by Greg Swann A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people. --Frederick Douglass A while ago I heard about the project initiated by a schoolteacher in Colorado to purchase and free slaves in the Sudan. Marshaling her students to the task, they raised enough money to free 1,000 slaves. What follows was my initial reaction: This seems to me to be a poor strategy for freeing slaves. The particular people purchased might be manumitted, but the purchases would tend to increase rather than diminish the market demand for slaves, resulting in the enslavement of even more innocent people. A strategy like this only makes sense where the quantity of the value to be purchased is inelastic, as with the Sierra Club or Ducks Unlimited purchasing and preserving unimproved land. In any case, the Denver school children would be wiser to send tractors to the Sudan. Slavery was eliminated from northern Africa and Europe with the advent of the wooden collar for draft animals. Before then, a horse did the work of five slaves but ate as much as five slaves. With wooden collars, a horse did the work of ten slaves but still only ate as much as five. Slavery became unprofitable, the outcome opposite to paying a premium price for slaves. The emotion-beclouded humanitarians are duly cautioned however: The slaves manumitted by tractors will be free to starve. In droves. With alacrity. It's a cruel world when you look closely, but it's usually crueler when you don't. All that's beside the point, though. My primary objection to this is that it comes down to indoctrinating children on topics about which they can have no reasoned opinion. Anything a child says about slavery or liberty or theology or free will or any other discipline of adult belief amounts to nothing more than the undigested regurgitation of what some adult has force-fed that child. The natural concerns of childhood are play. The appropriate work of childhood is education, and I think education should be limited _only_ to matters which are conceded to be true without controversy by all competent observers. I am opposed to inculcating children in anything that is, at bottom, a belief accepted on faith. This was unresearched, mere email, informed only by experience and a knowledge of history and economics. The first paragraph has proved true, as witnessed by this extract from the _Denver Post:_ A former leader of Christian Solidarity in the United States who now disavows slave buybacks, Jim Jacobson told The Post he changed his approach after a slave purchase last summer in Bahr al Ghazal. Soon after, he received a letter from a man in Sudan offering him many more slaves. "I just felt everything was not as it appeared to be," Jacobson said. "You don't know if after several days these groups of people get reabducted." Jacobson also said real prices of slaves are falling, from around $100 a head in the mid-1990s to less than $50 today - which he sees as evidence Sudanese people are responding to money by producing more and more slaves. Interestingly, the price for slaves is dropping, which argues that the supply is exceeding even the increased demand. This is an inference drawn from principles first taught by Adam Smith. Price Theory is relatively new though, originating only in 1776, so it's probably unfair to expect schoolteachers to have heard of it. The second paragraph of my reaction is underscored in a novel way in the same _Denver Post_ article: The buyback approach "is not eradicating slavery, it is enhancing it," Manase Lomole Waya, director of Humanitarian Assistance for South Sudan, said from his base in Nairobi, Kenya. "These good intentions are counterproductive," Waya said. "The (slave) redemption exercise is not a solution to the slave trade in Sudan. Redemption is counterproductive. If somebody cares, the local people should be empowered to defend themselves against slave raiders." I would be stunned and delighted to see school children raising money not to buy slaves, not to buy tractors, but to buy guns. _That_ would make news! There's more and more and endlessly more, but the salient facts are these: Primus: Barb Vogel, fifth-grade teacher at Highline Community School in Aurora, Colorado, got it into her head to _do something_ about slavery. Secundus: She roped her students into doing it with her. She tells the story the other way--that _they_ roped _her._ This seems unlikely, taking account of the organized-campaign-like web site Vogel runs to promote her tactics, but it remains that she was in charge of her classroom. If the children had suggested playing hooky or playing hockey or playing with a hookah, Ms. Vogel just _might_ have shown better judgment. Tertius: She garnered publicity, lots of it, about which more later. Quartus: As the result of her efforts and the children's, more people, not fewer, are enslaved in the Sudan. Quintus: Because Ms. Vogel was more interested in _doing something_ than in doing her job, innocent children were unwittingly put into the slave trade. They not only made things worse, they provided the financial means for making things worse. Sextus: After all this, Ms. Vogel is unremorseful and is unwilling to desist in her slaver ways. There is truly no end to this, and it's not _just_ because it entails slavery. It might be considered the _kind_ thing to do to absolve Ms. Vogel because, even though she did evil--and vows to persist in it--she was not operating on an evil intent. If we mention that well-trod road to hell, people are apt to say something about it being a school project. The implication is that school is a place where even the purported 'professionals' are expected to make mud-pies and nothing of any sort should be taken seriously. This is not the position that anyone would take if the dry cleaner inadvertently bleached a gown; it is difficult for me to see why one would complain and demand redress for a small disaster and yet make excuses for an _immense_ disaster. This disaster would not have happened if Ms. Vogel had been doing her job. The work of students is study, not fund-raising. The taxpayers of Aurora paid Ms. Vogel to teach, not to oversee fund-raising. Whether the goal of her misdirected mercy was to buy wheelchairs for war veterans or pre-natal care for wayward cats, _whatever_ end the funds had been put to would have been the wrong end. The _only_ reason the students were entrusted to Ms. Vogel's care was to obtain an education, and she cheated them and the taxpayers who pay her salary. That alone is sufficient grounds to hold her to a very stern accounting. It is not an irony but a tragic kind of justice that _had_ she done her actual job, her students could have learned why you cannot eliminate slavery by buying slaves. They could have read William Lloyd Garrison, for example, or Frederick Douglass, among many other astute authors on the subject. They could have read Smith or other economists to discover what could have been foreseen, that the buy-backs would result in more slavery, not less. They could have studied the history of human civilization, in the course of which they would have discovered that, as abhorrent as slavery is, there are fates still worse. In short, they could have had an education. Instead they were used--not as slaves but as unwitting dupes. They were cheated of an education and their labor was usurped by fraudulent means. Worse still, they were used as the puppets in Ms. Vogel's campaign of personal aggrandizement. This is a partial transcript from the NBC Nightly News, December 21, 1998: Reporter Roger O'Neil: The children know their money helps, but they've also written more than 1,000 letters asking adults to raise their voices against slavery. Unidentified Boy #2: Dear President and Mrs. Clinton... Unidentified Girl #2: I want you to put a stop to slavery. Unidentified Boy #3: You should be doing something about this. Unidentified Girl #3: We are kids trying to make a difference. Unidentified Boy #4: Sincerely, Ben. This is a rehearsed performance. The children are being used as stick figures to make an argument they could not and would not have made on their own. They are in no significant way different from the children who are costumed as Death for televised protest marches. They are dehumanized and turned into walking placards for some _adult's_ emotional argument, not a thoughtful, reasoned position of their own. And this is the unavoidable consequence of indoctrination. Putting innocent children into the slavery business was avoidable. Ms. Vogel's preening before the press and the Congress was avoidable. But the dehumanization of the victims of indoctrination _is not_ avoidable. It is precisely their humanity--their _reason--_that must be smothered by the indoctrinator. This is why dogmatists of all creeds so often prey upon children, because they haven't yet developed the habits of thoughtful reason and can be swayed with ease by specious appeals. And this is why Ms. Vogel and the many thousands of other dogmatists in the schools must be denounced. They don't do what we pay them to do--educate our children--and they do the very thing we pay them _not_ to do: By means of puerile suasion, they lead our children _away_ from the habits of thoughtful reason. _Any_ thoughtful person could have foreseen the disaster in the Sudan wrought by the disaster in Aurora. Our children are born enslaved by ignorance. We send them to school so that they may be manumitted by learning to be thoughtful people. Not slavers, not dupes, not ignorant puppets of their masters--who may themselves be ignorant puppets of unseen others. We send our children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated. It's a simple enough outcome to achieve, and it matters a hell of a lot more than a bleached gown... Guarding the guardians of the guards from "The Graves of Academe" by Richard Mitchell We have been hearing both from and about groups of citizens who have organized themselves as guardians of education and monitors of texts and techniques. Those who have written to us have praised our efforts, claiming a common cause and expecting that we will praise, and promote, their efforts. We will not. They are decent and well-meaning people disturbed about the obvious disorders of education, no doubt, but their understanding of "education" is as thoughtless and self-serving as that of the self-styled professionals of education who brought those disorders upon us. These guardians of education, while they differ in some ways, all seem proponents of the back-to-basics frenzy, in which we find no merit. We champion mastery, and we mean mastery, not minimum competence, in language and number not because it is the goal of education but because it is absurd to imagine an educated person who lacks it. Having that mastery, we can make of knowledge the raw material of thoughtfulness and judgment. Lacking it, we can make of knowledge nothing more than the substance of training and the content of indoctrination. The back-to-basics enthusiasts, who never fail to note the paramount importance of being able to read want-ads and to write letters of application, treat the skills of number and language as subdivisions of vocational training to be imparted and done with, as though reading a micrometer and reading a paragraph were acts of the same nature. In one sense, literacy is a trivial skill, easily acquired and neither more nor less valuable than those darlings of the schools, the "life skills," things like shoe-tying and crossing at the corner. In another sense, it is an endless and demanding enterprise that is also the ground of our knowledge and understanding, but an enterprise little likely to entice the minds of those taught literacy as a life skill. All unwittingly, therefore, the guardians preach the same degradation of literacy that the educationists have so long practiced, and, strange as it might seem at first, for the same reason. The greatest mischief done in the schools is the attempt to inculcate certain presumed "values," but the guardians understand that less than perfectly. They fancy that the mischief lies not in the inculcation of values but in the inculcation of the educationists' values rather than the guardians' values. All would be well, they imagine, if only the school would foster the "right" values. And that is why they must make of literacy a "basic" life skill rather than a way of life. If you want to foster in children certain values and preclude others, you must take care that they do not develop an appetite for knowledge and the skill to make of it the raw material of thoughtfulness and judgment. Jefferson's words are an assertion of faith, not fact; fact may be "self-evident," but "truth" is not. If it were, earth would be fair, and all men glad and wise. There is a momentous difference between coming to believe what we have often been told and deciding, as Jefferson did, out of knowledge and thoughtful judgment, to "hold" something true. The former is a kind of slavery and easy to achieve; the latter is difficult, for it requires knowledge and governed intellect, in other words, an education, but it is freedom. Freedom is, to be sure, frightening. There is no telling what values free people will choose to hold. Decent and well-meaning guardians of values were horrified by the monstrous principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is, of course, out of fear that the guardians preach the inculcation of values, fear of knowledge and thought. Most of the guardians urge things like the study of history and economics "emphasizing the benefits of the free enterprise system." We wholeheartedly share the guardians' devotion to the free enterprise system, but they obviously don't share our equal devotion to the study of history and economics, which will inevitably bring the knowledge of some facts, events, and ideas that are not at all conducive to our wholehearted devotion to the free enterprise system. When we study history from a certain point of view, we do not study history. If our students someday discover, as in fact they will, that we were sometimes mistaken in our knowledge of history, they will probably forgive us. But if they discover, as in fact they do, that we have misrepresented or omitted knowledge in the service of some values, they will learn to distrust both us and those values, as indeed they should-and apparently do. If our values are grounded, as we usually imagine they are, in evidence and reason, then those who can see the evidence and who know the ways of reason are likely to adopt them. However, if we find ourselves tampering with the evidence and tempering the power of language, the medium of reason, then perhaps we ought to reevaluate our values. Should that prove unacceptable, we should at least be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others that we do not love. The guardians do differ in one important way from the educationists. The guardians have lost their nerve, while the educationists still have plenty. The guardians, although they often wave the flag, do not truly hold the most basic value of a free society: the belief that, given the choice, knowing and thoughtful people will choose to continue in a free society. Those who do hold that value must guard against the guardians. But not in the classroom. "You have to make 'em look really proud that they are free now" We have a photograph of Barb Vogel's classroom in Aurora, Colorado. We'd like to show it to you, but we couldn't obtain reprint rights, and we are scrupulous about things like that. But a thousand words is at least as good as a picture, often much better. Ms. Vogel is the fifth-grade teacher who led her class in fund-raising efforts to buy freedom for slaves in the Sudan. They raised enough money to free 1,000 people. Unfortunately their efforts so invigorated the slave market in the Sudan that more people, not fewer, are now enslaved. In the photo, we see one wall of the classroom. The wall is literally covered with mementos of the slavery campaign. There are photos and posters and little paper doll figures. Here's how the latter are described in a _Denver Post_ article by reporter Bruce Finley: Each time news of a buyback reached Colorado, eager young students such as Lindy deSpain painstakingly cut out another paper figure and pasted it up on the "freedom wall" in their classroom. "You take some brown pieces of construction paper. We have these little people-tracing things. You trace around it and cut it out and color them in," Lindy said earnestly. "We color clothes and some of the scars and things they might have.... You have to make 'em look really proud that they are free now." Isn't that sweet? What better use could there be for a fifth-grader's time than making paper dolls? Reading? Writing? Math and science? Aw, where's your heart...? (A question that has occurred to us more than once is this one: Where were the children's parents in all of this? Did none of them say, "Hey, Sudan be damned, I want my kid to be schooled at school!") It is kind of young Ms. deSpain, too, to impute an emotional state to manumitted slaves. Contemplative people might wonder if they are homeless or starving or even re-enslaved. We suspect that there are no contemplative people among the paper doll makers in Ms. Vogel's class. Amidst the paper dolls there is a banner from an organization called "S.T.O.P.", which acronym stands for "Slavery That Oppresses People". The knee-jerk reaction is to ask, "What slavery _does not_ oppress people?" But contemplation intrudes yet again. We know of too many cases--in Rome, for example--of slaves who did not feel themselves oppressed. We have heard quite a bit about slaves who were horrified at the thought of manumission. And, of course, the Ottoman empire was fiercely defended for centuries by slaves. None of this can be unknown to the maker of the "S.T.O.P." sign. (Or perhaps it can; S.T.O.P. is an organization founded by Ms. Vogel herself, and she may be completely impervious to evidence.) In any case, we would bet the price of a Sudanese slave--cheaper by the minute--that every bit of it is unknown to Ms. Vogel's students. But: We would welcome being proved wrong. It is the singular mark of thoughtful people that they _want_ to be proved wrong. They may love their arguments or they may loathe them, as we sometimes do, but what they cherish more than any argument is to be right. Who prefers his position to truth may be many things, but what he is not is contemplative. To be thoughtful is to be wrong again and again, to be, it is but to be hoped, progressively _less_ wrong. So if there is a student in Ms. Vogel's class who can prove us wrong in even the smallest way, we will be chagrined and gratified. Write to us, young portents of Aurora's dawning, and instruct us in the greater mysteries and the lesser. We have on other pages called you gulls and dupes. We have insisted that you were deprived of an education, implying that your ignorance has been disturbed only by the inculcation of stupidity. We would like nothing better than to discover that this impression of you is incorrect. Thoughtful people have been known to scowl, but we vow to "look really proud" if you can make us believe that you might someday be free of the slavery of ignorance. So you be _our_ teacher. Show us that we have erred, if we have. Or show us that Ms. Vogel has more slaves to answer for than those pitiful wretches in the Sudan... Bruce Finley, honorary Hildy Johnson We make enough nasty cracks about reporters, but we are delighted to have something nice to say for a change. Bruce Finley's article in the _Denver Post_ is something we seem never to find in the newspaper: It is news. Print and broadcast news reports are crammed to bursting with stories that amount to, "It was said"--where what was said is always tendentious, often deceitful, and, if it is challenged at all, is challenged only by some other equally dubious testimony. By contrast, what Mr. Finley has done is ask, "Is this true?" The answer he got was disquieting, but like Hildy Johnson and Socrates, our Athens bureau chief, he followed the argument where it led. News in the newspaper... What a refreshing change! Bravo, Mr. Finley! Nicely done. --GSS This teacher really is a slave driver... > From: "Greg SwannČ > To: "Barb Vogel" > CC: "Arizona Education Superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan" , > "Arizona Education Association" , > "Arizona Governor Jane Dee Hull" , > "Arizona Parents for Traditional Education" , > "Barry Young - KFYI" , > "Bev Medlyn/The Arizona Republic" , > "Bob Mohan - KFYI" , > "Bobbie Jo Buel - AZ Daily Star" , > "David Berliner - Dean ASU College of Education" , > "Doug MacEachern/The Arizona Republic" , > "Ed Walsh - KFYI" , > "Jennifer Dokes/The Arizona Republic" , > "Jeremy Voas - New Times" , > "John Taylor - Dean UA College of Education" , > "Ken Western/The Arizona Republic" , > "Lattie Coor - President ASU" , > "Marianne Moody Jennings - ASU/Arizona Republic" , > "Marianne Moody Jennings - ASU/Arizona Republic" , > "Michael Limon - Tucson Citizen" , > "Patricia Biggs/The Arizona Republic" , > "Peter Likins - President UA" , > "Stephen Auslander - AZ Daily Star" , > "Mary Gifford" , > "Lew Rockwell" , > "Harry Browne" , > "The Separation of School and State Alliance" , > "Education Writers of America" , > "Center for Educational Reform" , > "Don Cloud" , > "Kansas Governor Bill Graves" , > "Andy Tompkins/Kansas Commissioner of Education" , > "Roger Myers/Topeka Capital-Journal" , > "Diane Carroll/Kansas City Star" , > "Kate Beem/Kansas City Star" , > "Edward M. Eveld/Kansas City Star" , > "Scott Rothschild/Wichita Eagle" , > "EducationNews.org" , > "Mike Bowler/Baltimore Sun" , > "Dr. Louisa C. Moats" , > "Bruce Finley/The Denver Post" , > "Sue O'Brien/The Denver Post" , > "David Fischer/Principal Highline Community School" , > "Colorado Governor Bill Owens" , > "Susan Wise Bauer" , > "Jessie Wise" , > "Robert Holland" , > "Greg Swann - Corresponding Secretary" > BCC: > Subject: Guerrilla Schooling #5: This teacher really is a slave driver... > Date: Sun, Aug 29, 1999, 6:08 AM This teacher really is a slave driver... A moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process. --A. E. Housman We love that quotation. It has that measured snottiness we so obviously admire. And yet, as amusing as it might be, it is a tragic statement, too. It reminds us of how common is thoughtlessness, and how easily avoided. Americans are a charitable people, as a rule, particularly with regard to the less-than-ideal efforts of the well-intentioned. If sweet old Mr. Flugelman shows up to give a little talk about his European travels wearing mismatched socks, we might smile behind our hand, but we would not be so rude as to point out the error. And even if he confuses Florence with Venice, we still might keep silent. But there must be _some_ level of error at which our silence becomes _un_charitable, where to fail to speak is to injure by omission. Surely the same sort of logic ought to apply to our schools. Do they fail to teach our children to read? Should we say, "Well, their hearts are in the right place." Do they teach our children a math that has nothing to do with math? Should we reply, "Well, it's the thought that counts." Do they becloud the waters of thought, so that our children enter school ignorant--the natural state--and emerge stupid--which is learned behavior? Should we answer, "Well, _you_ know..." Alas, we _do_ know. The 'professionals' of education are themselves very often stupid, themselves the victims of educationism. Their errors are worse--much worse--than mismatched socks, but it could seem churlish to submit their astoundingly uninformed enthusiasms to the scrutiny of reason. It might hurt their feelings, after all. And that's absurd on a couple of grounds. First, it is cruel to treat them as though they are not responsible adults but rather larger versions of the Special Education and Learning Disabled students they unearth in such abundance; it is cruel not to hold _anyone_ accountable for his actions, and educationists lack even the lame excuse of disability. Second, it is vicious to submit our children to people who are in fact professionals of _retardation_--decelerators, incapacitators, disassemblers. We spare their tender feelings by the sacrifice our children. This is no kindness. But carry things a little farther. Posit a teacher who refrains from teaching in order to put her young charges into some loathsome black market. Is it drugs? Outrageous! Is it prostitution? Insufferable! Is it illegal gun dealing? Unconscionable! No, it is even worse: A fifth-grade teacher in Colorado has converted her class of innocents into the financiers of human slavery. Yes, you read that correctly. A teacher has indoctrinated her students into being slavers. This was not their intent, of course. They thought they were freeing slaves. Instead they were rewarding slave-dealers and encouraging them to rob more people of their freedom. They worked with all their hearts and none of their minds to make an awful situation better and they succeeded only in making it horribly worse. Silence your mind, the better to hear the roars of condemnation... O, deafening silence. Are you saying, "Well..."? Well nothing. You can argue that the teacher, Barb Vogel, made a thoughtless error, but it is her job to use her mind in the service of teaching her young charges to use _their_ minds. A moment's thought would have shown her her error, but she forbore to think and in consequence irreparably corrupted the lives of innocent children. If you are willing to say "Well..." to this, you will say it to _anything._ Sadly, you won't lack for company. We have followed this story for some while. Its predictable denouement was brought to us by Bruce Finley of the _Denver Post,_ who is much to be commended. But the self-same _Denver Post_ had this to say in an editorial: Nonetheless, we're proud of the children of the Aurora school for embarking on the program. They saw human suffering, and they tried to ease it. They saw sorrow, and they tried to spread joy. And they did all these things with the very best American idealism and the most devoted efforts. That is, even though the supposed beneficiaries are worse off than they were before, and even though a group of young innocents have become unwitting promoters of human slavery, _still_ we must excuse them and Ms. Vogel their thoughtlessness. Their hearts were in the right place--even though their _minds_ were in the _wrong_ place. It is unfortunate that Ms. Vogel was _not_ a thoughtless advocate of drugs or prostitution or gun-running instead of a thoughtless financier of slavery. Maybe then people would not so thoughtlessly excuse her awful error. _They_ may excuse her. We do not. We like for our special guests to be more comical and less tragic, but this is not sufficient grounds to deprive Ms. Vogel of what she has earned. And thus she is honored as the honorary baboon for the new issue of _Guerrilla Schooling,_ the web-based magazine concerned with practical strategies for wresting a rigorous academic education for our children from an education establishment stoutly committed to doing everything _but_ providing rigorous academic education. We are guerrillas, not reformers, and what we seek is a _real_ education, not any of the many unreasonable, unreasoning facsimiles. For _our_ children, not all children everywhere. _Now,_ while they're still children. Even now we should like to find something funny to say about Ms. Vogel, about her thoughtlessness, about her indoctrination of thoughtlessness in her students, about the thoughtless reactions to her thoughtlessness. But we cannot. We might weep, were we of that kind. But we are the kind that spits, which is vulgar and a detestable habit in any case. The ugly appetite that hides under cover of the name 'justice'--which it is not--might scream for revenge. But we don't want revenge. All we want--all _I_ want--is for children to be so well schooled in the use of the mind that they can _never_ be gulled into doing something vicious because it _seems_ right, because it _feels_ right, because some large number of the gulled _say_ it is right. All I want is for children to learn to use their minds so well that they can _never_ be gulled, so they do only what they _know_ is right. Thoughtlessness is simply the failure to have thought, and we school our children so that they may learn never to fail to think. Every ugly consequence resulting from Ms. Vogel's thoughtlessness resulted from her failure to practice the habits of thoughtful reason and from her failure to teach her students those habits. _This_ is what she ought to be held to account for, she and all the other 'professionals' of education. We don't wish for Ms. Vogel to have _her_ mind in the wrong place, but it's her mind; she can do with it as she pleases. But we don't want our children to have _their_ minds in the wrong place, and our children are _not_ the property of the 'professionals' of education to do with as they please. A moment's thought should have told us all of this long ago. But thought is a painful process. And a moment is a long, long time... So that Ms. Vogel may ruminate on what has befallen her, we cough up cud-like the usual caveats: If you should someday find your name in the 'To:' line, take heart. It's a rare honor, and you can only claim it by taking and failing to earn tax-dollars for the work of the mind. And you can always strive to do better in the future, although we won't be reserving any breaths awaiting that outcome. If you're in the 'CC:' line, it's because you are presumed to have an interest in education. Fair warning: Being in the 'CC:' line will not keep you out of the 'To:' line. The guerrillas are in the 'BCC:' line, the line you can't see. If you think we are laughing at you, you could be as much as half right. And while well-begun is half-done, this time the worm is surely done to a turn. We have more to say about Ms. Vogel of course; we could fill a book with thoughts about thoughtlessness, and the dogma we elaborate is devout anti-indoctrinationism. Plus which, we actually have something nice to say about a newspaper reporter. We tread again the paths of Richard Mitchell, so well proved. We dance a while with a pair of very classy classicists, an honor we do not deserve but revel in nonetheless. And we witness--wide-eyed and incredulous--as Wayne Lutz carries the schooling back to the schooler. Doubt it never, we are smokin'. Feast upon our mesquite-grilled goodness at: http://www.presenceofmind.net/Guerrilla/ When you're picking your teeth, give some thought to the slavery of ignorance and what we can do to eradicate it. Surely this is the necessary first step to eliminating the slavery of the body. If our minds are in the right place, our hearts will be also. The one must follow the other, as any thoughtful mind can discover. Until next time, Greg Swann gswann@presenceofmind.net http://www.presenceofmind.net/Guerrilla/