I will now go on to speak of the poor end. When I finish, please, do not have questions only about the distant poor or tell me you or someone you know is doing exactly that kind of thing. Please remember to pay attention to the mortal illiteracy at the affluent end, an illiteracy that contaminates our everyday and perpetuates the divided world. Whoever wishes to involve herself at the poor end (I am sorry at this point I don’t have vocabulary for this, so I just use “rich end” and “poor end.” You will see what it means by the end. In fact, there is a children’s book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad). Whoever wishes to involve herself at the poor end must have the patience and perseverance to learn well one of the languages of the rural poor of the South. For the purposes of the essential and possible work of righting wrongs in the political sphere, the great European languages are sufficient, but for access to the mindset down there, you have to really learn the language well. This cannot be done without the language. You know you can’t go to a psychoanalyst that doesn’t know your language. Teaching is not a well-paid profession like psychoanalysis but, on the other hand, in order to get into this work with the largest sector of the electorate in the global south, you certainly have to learn at least one language. There is no alternative to that at all.

Access to the mindset of those who have been forced down is to devise a pedagogy that respects the delegitimized ethical tradition. This respect must take into account the multiplicity of neglected languages. I have no doubt that English is more convenient for the world to go around, but we are not talking about convenience here. Your title, Living Literacies, is not about convenience. This is because the task of the educator is to learn to learn from below, to learn the lines of conflict resolution undoubtedly available, however dormant, within the disenfranchised cultural system, giving up convictions of triumphalist superiority. It is because of the linguistic restriction that one is obliged to speak of just the roots one works for but, in the hope that some who are interested in comparable work will hear these words, I always push for generalization. In order to generalize, I go regularly to a few rural schools in Yunnan province in the People’s Republic of China. I used to go to Algeria for this reason until 1994, when it became impossible. I believe these attempts to generalize are not idle. It is instructive to see, all over the world, the cultural assumptions of the already subordinated positions that did not translate, or are not translating, into the emergence of early capitalism. We are now teaching our children in the north, and no doubt in the north of the south, that to learn the movement of finance capital is to learn social responsibility. It is in the remote origins of this conviction – that capitalism is responsibility – that we locate the beginning of the failure of the aboriginal groups of the kind with whom I work. We Indians are also a colony, from millennia before the European incursion. It is in the remote origins of that history that we locate the beginning of the failure of the aboriginal groups that I will go on to touch, their entry into a distancing from modernity as a gradual slipping into atrophy, [a process that is] a few thousand years old. In our case, the colonial encounter started longer ago than in Australia or South Africa.