Yet this is the one field where databasing is taken to be the last instance. Anyone who has gone to any of the UN organizational meetings in the name of international feminism knows exactly what I am talking about. A desire to redistribute is not the unproblematic consequence of a well-fed society. In order to get that desire moving by the cultural imperative of education you have to fix the possibility of putting not just wrong over against right, with all the genealogical lines compressed within it, but also to suggest that another antonym of right is responsibility, and further, that the possibility of such responsibility is underived from right, so that today we have not the white man’s burden, but the burden of the fittest to guilt- and shame-trip the rest of the world into behaving correctly. That kind of implicit social Darwinism is what I am questioning here.

Databasing for literacy among the less well fed bypasses this problem. Training into the general culture is reflected by the fact that Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, Merrill Lynch and other big investment companies are accessing preschoolers. Children are training parents to manage portfolios. There is a growing library of books making it “fun” for kids to invest and giving them detailed instructions on how to do so. The unquestioned assumption – to be rich is to be happy and good – is developed by way of many educational excuses. The recent dissatisfaction with corporate corruption has not significantly altered this assumption. It has simply produced the awareness that the successful rich cheat us on our way to happiness. Let me quote a brief passage from a book called Wow the Dow. “Children are never too young to start grasping the fundamentals of money management.” (I am looking at problems at the top of the spectrum because we always speak benevolently of those people who, unfortunately, are getting trampled by us.) “Even toddlers understand the concept of mine.” Exclamation point. So why talk about the other? “In fact, it’s the idea of owning something they like that sparks their interest in investing. Rest assured you won’t turn your child into a little grubber by feeding that interest. Through investing, you are going to teach him more about responsibility, discipline, delayed gratification and even ethics than you ever thought possible.” Another exclamation mark. Now this, we have to look at this before we just go on shedding tears for the other end of the world. Such a training of children builds itself on the loss of the cultural habit of assuming the agency of responsibility as located in something that is radically other. However “literate” they are, it is a killing literacy, not a living literacy.