As a young soldier, Colin Hannaford had 'an interesting experience' in which it seemed to him that he was instructed by God that the survival of humankind depends on people everywhere learning to be honest and to think for themselves. He was reluctant to become a modern messiah, and when he reported this to scholars of Trinity College, Isaac Newton's old college in England, they advised him to try to incorporate it in his new career as a math teacher. Some years later he made an astonishing discovery. Unnoticed by scholars for two thousand years, when the otherwise endlessly squabbling tribes of ancient Greece were faced with imminent annihilation by the Persian empire, they learnt from Sparta how to unite their differences of intelligence and experience through a very simple form of argument of just three steps: evidence; connection; conclusion. This allowed them to form the first democracy, to agree together how to defend their young nation against successive attacks by the Persian armies and navy: and this same simple form of argument became the basis of all later mathematics and now of modern science. Having retired from active teaching, Colin decided to write this book after his companion - 'just a dog', called Amadeus - died. Rather than killing himself - at the age of seventy-five, this was a serious first option - he channelled his grief into reviving his anger at the failure of schools to treat young people with the respect they deserve, and the consequent loss for the majority of their respect for honesty and trust of others. "This," he told student teachers in a lecture in an Oxford university last year, "is a national disaster: a disaster that our educationalists and politicians refuse to admit is their responsibility. Our schools have become the breeding grounds of many of the insanities that blight our lives, that divide and weaken entire nations. Children are made to work in a toxic environment in schools of relentless competition that destroys the very foundations of democracy. You must not expect that this will be easy to change. At every level there will be powerful resistance to recognise that the way school teachers are trained to teach - as most in authority will have been taught in their youth; as they continue to recruit, train, supervise, inspect, and award teachers to continue to teach, year by year, grade by grade, continuing to divide children and students into mutually distrustful tribes is the cause of the cancers of the distrust, fear, and resentment in later societies. The present system has rewarded them with authority, entrusted them with determining the future of new generations. They cannot admit that the evils that result are caused by their dutiful obedience to orders that no one dares question. The majority of teachers are taught to teach as if children's minds are mainly empty buckets that they are required to fill with facts. That there is a national epidemic of school exclusions and expulsions, children's depression, adult depression, juvenile crime, increasing street violence, abuse of alcohol and other drugs, the collapse of civil respect: all this has nothing to do with the systematic degradation in schools of youngsters' trust and regard for others. It is inevitable that those promoted by this system feel, at best, derision for democracy, still more likely is contempt. He reports one school boss telling him, after attending one of his lesson: "You must stop teaching these children to learn like this at once; or, in another few years, they won't need a teacher at all!" Most were aged fourteen. The boss was more worried that teaching them 'like this' would reduce his workforce. Many of Colin's old pupils are still thanking him for teaching them 'to learn like this'. In this book, he describes how children can enlist their favourite teacher to allow to learn in a monthly or more frequent 'Amadeus Lesson', how in learning together, they will all stay strong! Buy it he