This process is followed through by relentless education into business culture and academic, and on-the-job training, and management and consumer behaviour. At my university, I am told that even at Columbia, education is a business, and so we should look at investment in this way and that way. I have become a little expert. Prepared for by the thousands and thousands of business schools all over the global south as well as the north, training undergraduates into business culture, making it impossible to strengthen the responsibility-based grassroots layer by the ethics of class/culture difference, consolidating class apartheid. Gentrification kills an imagination focused only on survival, the imagination that I met in those remedial reading classes.

However utopian it might seem, it now appears to me that the only way to living literacies, at both ends of the spectrum, is for those who teach in the humanities to take seriously the necessary but impossible task to construct a collectivity among the dispensers of bounty as well as the victims of oppression. Learning from the grassroots comes, paradoxically, through teaching. In practical terms, working across the class/culture difference which tends to misfire or refract effort, trying to learn from children and from the behaviour of class inferiors, the teacher learns to recognize, not just a benevolently coerced assent, but also an unexpected response. For such an education, speed, quantity of information and number of students reached are not exclusive virtues. Those “virtues” are inefficient for education in responsibility, not so much a sense of being responsible for but as being responsible to – before good intentions, so that it becomes reflexive. We have lots of examples of how, in fact, welfare does not by reflex act well toward others. Institutionally, the humanities, like all disciplines, must be subject to calculation. It is how we earn our living. But where living has a larger meaning, as I hope it does in your title, the humanities are without guarantees, and that is their strength. I speak at such length about this end of the spectrum because I am fortunate enough to be deeply involved at both ends. I can speak with confidence against the idea that this end gives and the other end receives, that the death of literacy is only a problem for the poor. I have nothing but contempt for cultural relativism or cultural conservatism, so that is not what you are hearing.