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I would first like to thank Mr. Teodoru for his gracious comments about what I wrote. Second, I would like to answer his last question. He wrote: " Can he put himself in these tyrants' shoes, based on his life experience? Can he learn much about himself from learning much about them?" My answer is "yes." For instance, I was waiting for a table at a local restaurant and two little girls sat down at a counter across from me. I assumed that they were sisters. They both had been given a sheet of paper and some crayons. The counter was about ten feet wide and there were five or six stools, none of which were occupied. The older girl sat down in the middle and the younger girl attempted to sit on her sister's left. The older girl replied, "No! You sit there." And, she pointed to the seat just to her right. For some reason this caught my attention. I began to wonder why this girl would demand that her sister sit on her right rather than her left. No one else was sitting at the counter, so it could not have been a desire to protect her sister. Both girls seemed healthy; I did not notice any hearing aids, glasses, or any other evidence of disability. The number of seats to the older girl's left and right were roughly the same, maybe three seats to the left and two seats to the right. So, why did this girl force her sister to sit on her right rather than her left. My conclusion is that she wanted to exhibit dominance over her sister. I have observed much of the same behavior in other children. In answer to Mr. Teodoru's question. I understand both observationally and personally how the tyrant thinks because I am a tyrant of sorts; and, I believe we all have a bit of the tyrant in us. Whether we are talking about Alexander, Julius Caesar, Caligula, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, or Mao, I think we are talking about individuals who are seen as aberrations. They are people who got away with asserting their wills because for a time people found them useful. Most of us cannot assert ourselves like this, although we all would love to do it. The point here is that each of us could be an Alexander if we had the talent, the will, and the cooperation of a large minority of the people. Fortunately, history teaches us that these tyrannies never last. They will either end with the natural, or unnatural, death of the tyrant. With regard to teaching students I think it is important to have students think about one thing in depth rather than learn a bunch of facts that only give them a surface understanding of history, or life. Why do we expect students to enjoy learning 200 years of history in 12 or 16 weeks? Isn't this like arguing that there is no qualitative difference between good conversation over a slow meal and gorging on your meal while a drill sergeant yells at you to "Eat it now, taste it later!"? I think students would enjoy history more if we were less like drill sergeants and more like a good conversationalist.
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