Alan, I always enjoy reading anything you post because your insights get me thinking about issues from very different perspectives, but I am also glad to see that we agree on one of your final statements in the previous post: the importance of humility. I made a point in class recently that all knowledge should be treated with a great amount of tolerance. As academics, we should all be tolerant of any knowledge because any such body of knowledge possesses an equal chance of being corrrect, or valid might be a better word.. While I realize that my view leaves my assertion open to the counter claim of extreme skepticism or the accusation that "all knowlwdge is relevant," I still believe that academic research, inquisitiveness, and curosity demand this tolerance. Aristotle thought he was correct about almost everything he wrote, and of course we know that many of his ideas have been proven to be incorrect.
I also appreciate the fact that we as humans can be wrong. I always like to speak with my history students about the misguided attempts of the late mediaeval/early modern Roman Catholic Chuirch to maintain and reinforce, to the point of death, the notion of a geo-centric cosmology. Any time a person, group of people, or powerful organization believe that dogma should dominate and that any counter knowledge should be prohibnited, humility and tolerance are lost. Finally this point brings me to the Tupper and Cappello essay about teaching treaties. In my first Masters program, I had a Canadian history class in which no mention was ever made of First Nations peoples and only passing reference to the many treaties that helped to create the Canada we have today. As a young historian, I was still not accustomed to questioning the voices of those who were supposedly the "experts" of their respective fields. While I enjoyed that "graduate" class at the time, I am sure that I would not do so now as I would be continually full of questions about the lack of inclusion and the exclusivity of the dominator culture directing the course.