Dear Teacher

I am the victim of a concentration camp. My eyes have seen what no man should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers; children poisoned by educated physicians; infants killed by trained nurses; women and babies shot and burned by high school graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is this: help your students to become humane. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing and mathematics are important only if they serve to make our children
more humane.

At a time when Government seems obsessed with league tables and targets, SAT results and risk assessments, Ofsted inspections and ceaseless teacher evaluation, it is good to know that some schools go beyond the statutory curriculum, involve the pupils in exciting and innovative projects and endeavour to do what Ginott exhorts – to help young people to become more compassionate and caring.

I was asked to launch the splendid book Ending the Slave Trade with William Wilberforce of Hull at the Hull Street Life Museum. Supported by the writer and lecturer John Haden, the children at St Nicholas Primary School researched, wrote and illustrated their own accounts of the slave trade and narrated the story of the life and work of the city's most famous son.

They gained a real insight and learnt about the part Wilberforce played in bringing it to an end. They also learnt that slavery is still big business around the world (there are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic trade) and that slavery does not just exist in far-off places like Brazil, but that there is people-trafficking in this country.

At the launch, teachers, parents, education officers and invited guests listened in silence as the children sang a selection of traditional slave songs and laments. It was a powerful and moving experience. I can do no better than finish this piece with a poem written by two pupils, Chavez and Harriet, which conveys the panic of the Ibo people before their capture:



Then the darkness came

Men came down the river

In the night

Towards the village

Hiding in the bushes

Ready to make a move.

Suddenly...

Screaming, shouting,

Crying, yelling,

Shoving, dragging,

Whipping, beating.

Bodies falling to the ground

Like sacks of sand.

We were forced to be slaves.

n Ending the Slave Trade costs £6.50 from St Nicholas Primary School, Cottingham Road, Hull, East Yorkshire, HU6 7RH.