School Failure	C. P.Lexicon	ResponsiveTeaching	Democracy	Inclusion	Bonds	Illich
Creationism	Bilingual Ed.	Vouchers	Childhood	Wealthfare	Values	Standards

Values

Before you decide that you want to teach "values" in your classes. Think about these. There was a time when each of these was a "value" held by a society. 

        "In theory [the husband of a Roman woman] could always divorce her.  But it was wise to have a reason -- committing adultery, getting drunk, brewing poisons, making copies of the household keys -- and to discuss the divorce in family council.  (He could sell the children, too, if he needed money, though in the fourth century [Emperor Constantine of the Holy Roman Empire] made it a crime for a father to kill them, at least without cause.)"

         Under the reign of William the Conqueror, "[s]ervants could be bribed or tortured to testify to a wife"s adultery.  Not that testimony was always necessary; in the early Middle Ages a man might simply accuse and kill her in a single gesture."

         "Christianity moved into the leadership vacuum left by the Fall of Rome.  Suddenly monogamy was supposed to apply to men as well as women.  "And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery; and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery." Furthermore, "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."

         "In the sixth and seventh centuries upper-class men could have all the women they could afford (Dagobert I, King of the Franks, married three women in a single ceremony)."

         "In 18th-century England, a man . . . Could dispose of his wife by selling her to another man. . . . . .  "[The husband] puts a halter around her neck and thereby leads her to the next marketplace, and there puts her up to auction to be sold to the highest bidder, as if she were a brood mare or a milch-cow.""

Barbara Holland.  "The Long Good-Bye," Smithsonian, March 1998, pp. 86-93.