The fact is there was Indian class collaboration with British education, and why not? What are we doing here, today? You say the British created the desire but what is education but an uncoercive rearrangement of desires? you can’t just have those neat formulas, separating colonizer and colonized. You have to think through how these things fall. The metropolitan specialist has no sense of the pedagogic significance of the instruments. My discovery of the specific pattern of the primer was a revelation that came after eight years of involvement with using the primer, five years ago. Since I do not consolidate instruction for the teacher except in response to a felt need, it came only when I was letting the teacher at one school take down hints as to how to teach the students at the lowest level. As I continued, I realized that the primer had pre-empted me at every step.

I hope the impatient reader will not take this as just another anecdote about poor instruction. I hope I have made it clear by now that, in spite of all the confusion attendant upon straying from the beaten track, the practice of elementary pedagogy for the children of the rural poor is a very important weapon. But it is a hands-on, labour-intensive work of training the teacher to change teaching into teaching literate reading and writing. You have to begin from the language. Nothing but the mother tongue allows this. This is not the kind of metropolitan bilingualism where subcultural attention to language is always congratulated: Oh, yes, very nice, but at home you talk Persian. I am talking about something else. It is only through learning the mother tongue that we actually get into that uncanny experience of the synthetic a priori, if you want a European phrase. That the child inserts itself into a language with a history and a language that will continue later and you have to use that in order to make this change.¹

The incident involved the children writing to the state to ask for a tube well. I carried the letter, to no avail. Through the writing of this letter, with mistakes that I did not correct, they actually became aware of the public sphere. They became actors in the public sphere. And they also learnt an important lesson: the heartlessness of the public sphere without short-term resistance talk. Such talk, like the survivalist imagination in the remedial classes, doesn’t last. In the best case scenario, resistance talk may be okay as long as it is freedom from but it is not okay when it is freedom to, because you have not been teaching in this other way, to rearrange desires. Mutatis mutandis, I go with W. E. B. DuBois rather than Booker T. Washington. It is more important to develop critical intelligence than to assure material comfort. This may or may not bear immediate fruit. Let me repeat yet again, although I fear I will not convince the benevolent ethnocentrists, that I am not interested in teaching “self-help.” Many, many indigenous NGO’s have names that mean self-help in the original language. That’s another crock that I will not open for the moment. I’m interested in being a good enough humanities teacher in order to be a conduit; Wordsworth’s word. I am a bricoleuse between subaltern children and their subaltern teacher. That is my connection with DuBois, who writes a great deal about teacher training.