This history breeds the need for activating an ethical imperative atrophied by a gradual distancing from the narrative of progress, colonialism, capitalism. This is the argument about cultural suturing, learning from below to supplement with the possibility of the subject-ship of rights, of someone who can, indeed, be the capital “I,” who speaks inalienable rights for everyone, rather than just the beneficiary of a threatened and menaced state. The subject-ship of rights comes with cultivating an intuition of the public sphere. I will talk about this intuition of the public sphere in a moment.

The national education systems are pretty hopeless at this level because they are the detritus of the post-colonial or post-imperial state, an imposed system turned to rote, unproductive of felicitous colonial subjects like ourselves, at home or abroad. This is part of what started the rotting of the cultural fabric of which I speak. Yet the state bureaucracy dismisses what it perceives as procedural interference.

I am not just saying that the poor should have “the kind of education we have had.” As I have indicated again and again, the need for supplementing metropolitan education, the kind of education we have had, is something I am involved with every day in my salaried work. Here I am talking for a modest fee to a somewhat filled auditorium. When you are actually confronting the post-colonial state, which is much more comfortable with the remote impatience of the United Nations Development Program, it is hard to say, “education like ours is not what we are talking about.” Local people who work at that end don’t have any idea of what really goes on at the other end. Even if they have been abroad, they wouldn’t have been teaching English, the dominant language of the metropolis. The people who produce critical reports are, at best, education specialists from local universities or mid-level government officials. One of the local primary school headmasters said to me after a particularly scathing report was issued, “Sister, what are we going to do with this report? We are not doing our job well, I noticed. But where is the `how to’?” And his schools are above the level I am speaking about.