Half way through the book the child begins to read a book and the title of that page is: Prothom Path, First Reading – not First Lesson. What a thrill it must have been for that child, undoubtedly a boy, to get to that moment. Today, this is impossible because the teachers and the teachers’ teachers, indefinitely, are clueless about this book as a do-it-yourself instrument. And this is just one example. Well-meaning education experts in the capital city, whose children are used to a different world (who have probably read John Dewey – that class difference is theorized into cultural instruction), inspired by self-ethnographing bourgeois nationalists of a period well after Vidyasagar (Dewey plus Montessori if you like, if young enough perhaps some experience with schools for Bangladeshi immigrants’ children in London, et cetera) have transformed the teachers’ pages into children’s pages by way of ill-conceived illustrations.

In the rural areas, this meaningless gesture has consolidated the book as an instrument for dull, rote learning. The page where Vidyasagar encourages the teacher to jumble the structure is now a meaningless page routinely ignored. I could multiply examples such as this, and not in India alone. Most of the subordinate languages of the world do not have simple, single language dictionaries that rural children could use. Efforts to put together such a dictionary in Bengali failed, lost in false promises and red tape. The habit of independence in a child’s mind starts with the ability to locate meaning without a teacher. If the kind of well-meaning experts who put together the pictures in the primer put the dictionary together, it would be geared for the wrong audience. Even the teachers don’t understand the dictionary that is produced for class four in the capital city. The generalizing significance of this case is that, at the onset of colonialism/capitalism, when the indigenous system of teaching began to be emptied of social relevance, there had been an attempt to undo this. The discontinuity between the upwardly mobile colonial subject and the rural poor is such that the instruments of such undoing were thoughtlessly deactivated.

I am giving you a Bengali example because I am a Bengali Europeanist, but there must be comparable efforts in the other Indian languages. My involvement tells me that if the first language is not learnt well, there is no hope of learning English. If I began to talk about the problems of teaching and learning English at this level, I would never stop.