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Good morning When news broke that 60 young Afghan women, off to take up scholarships in Dubai, had been turned back at the airport, my heart sank. With women already banned from attending University in their own country, this had been their last hope. A hope dashed by the relentless efforts of the Taliban regime to stop women and girls from studying to higher levels. It was Francis Bacon who first asserted “knowledge is power”, back in the 1500s. Late last century, Kofi Annan expanded that concept, when he added “Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family”. The Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by the UN in 2015, nine years after Annan retired as its Secretary General, include that Quality Education should be available everywhere by 2030. The plight of the Afghan women demonstrates a sad consequence of Bacon’s maxim, if you want to restrict access to power, then block education. Preventing access to learning is, of course, nothing new. William Tyndall, who translated the Latin text of the Bible into English, was burnt at the stake in 1536; just one of many martyrs in the battle of the Protestant Reformation in Europe to make Christian Scriptures available in the languages people spoke. I applaud what Tyndall and others did. Henceforth many more Christians could read and reflect on God’s word, beyond the narrow circles of authority. Both in the Church and across wider society, knowledge, and with it power, could become more widely distributed. Other ways of limiting knowledge, and hence retaining power, have been found. Not least by controlling the curriculum. As late as the early nineteenth century, a version of the Bible was printed particularly for use among enslaved Africans in the British West Indies. It carefully excised any passages that might support emancipation. Similar practices persist today, from the regular stories of books being banned by Education Boards in America, to the censorship of allegedly unpatriotic treatments of history across many parts of the world. I didn’t know it at the time, but the glowingly positive narrative of the British Empire I was taught in my own school days, concealed the unpalatable truth known to the many who suffered at its hands. Now, as millions of children prepare to return to school next week, my hope is that what they learn, from both their teachers and their classmates, will provide them with that level of critical reflective thinking that will prove empowering knowledge. So, if you have kids reluctant to get out of bed that first school day, you might just try grabbing the duvet while echoing Bacon’s time honoured maxim? And good luck with that!