I am speaking then of the scandal that, in the global south, in the schools for the poor, what one does with the page is spell and memorize, and even that not too well. Consider the following – the misfortune of a local effort undertaken in the middle of the nineteenth century. Ishwarchandra Bandyopadhyay, better known as Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, a nineteenth-century intellectual from rural Bengal was twenty when Macaulay wrote his minute on Indian education. Vidyasagar fashioned pedagogic instruments for Sanskrit and Bengali that could, if used right (the question of teaching again) suture the “the natives’“ old with Macaulay’s new, rather than reject the old and commence its stagnation with that famous and horrible sentence very well known in this auditorium I am sure. “A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” The Vidyasagar primer is still used in state-run primary schools in rural West Bengal. It is a modernizing instrument for teaching. It activates the structural neatness, produced in the nineteenth century, of the Sanskrit and Bengali alphabet for the teacher and the child, which is ruined by the new edition. If you read the alphabet up and down rather than from side to side, you see how rationalized the old system is, with the aspiration increasing on the same pattern of consonants. All of this is totally ruined by today’s unexamined revisions. As a modernizing instrument, the nineteenth-century primer undermined rote learning by encouraging the teacher to jumble the structure and course of teaching at the same time. The wherewithal is all there but no one knows how to use it anymore. The first part of the book is for the active use of the teacher.

You go to Calcutta and you talk about trying to get recruits. Obviously, one can’t do this alone, and I wouldn’t join an NGO if you paid me a million dollars. So, when I try to recruit the Calcutta benevolent folks, I hear, “We are writing new textbooks.” These rural teachers don’t know how to use a book. Writing new textbooks will do nothing, but it’s an easier solution. So, the first part of the nineteenth-century book is for the active use of the teacher. The child does not read the book yet, just listens to the teacher and learns to read and write by reading the teacher’s writing and writing as the teacher guides. Reading and writing are thus not soldered to the fetishized schoolbook. In very poor rural areas with no books or newspapers anywhere this would still be a fine way to teach if the teacher knew how to read or use a book. (If you have been stumped a hundred times in a lot of places by both teacher and student producing some memorized bit from the textbook when asked to write whatever comes to mind, you are convinced of this. If you just go for a single photo-op you will never know this.)