The teachers on this ground level at which we work tend to be the worst products of a bad system. Our educators must learn to train children by attending to the children. For, just as our children are not born electronic, their children are not born delegitimized. They are not yet “least successful.” It is through learning how to take children’s responses to teaching as our teaching text that we can hope to put ourselves in the way of “activating democratic structures.”²

My experience of learning from the children for the last decade tells me that nurturing the capacity to imagine the public sphere and the fostering of independence within chosen rule governance, is the general hypothesis of democracy, which will best match the weave of the torn but greatly detailed fabric of the culture, long neglected by the dominant. The trick is to train the teachers by means of such intuitions. Uncoercively rearranging desires is a scary thing (but, on the other hand, a teacher is a teacher, and I am speaking of myself ). It contests, most often, unexamined desires for specific kinds of futures for the children. No mean trick to rearrange here. For these teachers have been so maimed by the very system of education that we are trying to combat and are so much within the class apartheid produced by that, that they would blindly agree and obey while the trainer was emoting over consciousness raising. Great tact is called for if the effort is to draw forth consent rather than obedience. In addition, the children have to be critically prepared for disingenuously offered cyberliteracy if these groups get on the loop of “development.” I am thinking of the way in which Inuit here and Native Americans there are used to open these great cyberliteracy conferences with some so-called tribal rite, et cetera. Think twice about what that means.

The hope is that this effort with the teachers will translate into the teaching of these reflexes in the educational method of the children who launch the trainer on the path of this general hypothesis. The children are the future electorate. They need to be taught the habits and reflexes of such democratic behaviour, even as children at this end are taught how to manage portfolios. Necessary yet seemingly impossible, you cannot gauge this one by way of statistics and photo ops. Produced by this class corrupt system of education, the teachers themselves do not know how to write freely. They do not know the meaning of what they “teach,” since all they have to teach when they are doing their job correctly is spelling and memorizing. They do not know what dictionaries are. They have themselves forgotten everything they memorized in order to pass out of primary school. When we train teachers, as I train teachers at the top in my Ph.D. classes at Columbia, we must, above all, leave them alone to see if the efforts of us outsiders have been responsive enough, credible enough without any material promises.