| In the interest of time I will simply recapitulate.
First, the cultural responsibility is as corrupted here as there, but
in different ways. The effort is to learn it with patience from above
or below and to keep trying to suture it to the imagined felicitous subject
of universal human rights. I teach Kant here. “Religion Within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason” is that from the eighteenth century on
down, this great text has been psychologized. You must undo that –
for at this end of the spectrum the culture is personalist. So, the point
is that you have to get into the cultural texts of the students at both
ends. Second, the education system there is a corrupt ruin of the colonial
model, just as here it is a trivialized replica of social imperialism.
The effort is to undo it persistently, to teach the habit of democratic
civility rather than talk about a call to arms in the classroom, globalism,
post-nationalism, depending where you are teaching, resistance talk in
between, and identitarianism. Among the books I read in preparation for
this conference two stand out – Literacy: A
Critical Source Book, edited by Ellen Cushman, Eugene Kintgen,
Barry Kroll, and Mike Rose, and Writing Without Words:
Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by
Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo. The first is a stunningly well-researched
book, and yet, in spite of the regulation Paulo Freire piece, it is too
thoroughly North American to call itself a source book, but who is noticing?
The very first paragraph of the introduction, “Literacy Surrounds
Us” makes this abundantly clear. It makes me go back to where I
began, with an exhortation to modify, qualify, situate, and imagine, imagine,
imagine. Don’t just be benevolent. The other book, the book by Boone
and Mignolo, brought home to me once again the hurtfulness of history.
I have repeatedly deplored the cultural systems that have been delegitimized
since the beginning of what we must call our world as we stand in this
room. No project can make that other literacy, that literacy of orality,
live again. The literacy of robust orality cannot live again. The best
we can hope for is to turn tradition into theatre by way of the museum,
the performative into performance, and that is a discussion that belongs
elsewhere. Thank you for your patience.
Endnotes
- Here I had given an example of my attempt to insert the children
into the intuition of the public sphere – the intuition that the
state exists to serve the citizen. This can provide for the later, rational
lesson that the vote is a sign of citizenship, if and when the student
is about to graduate. In the current state of play, there is no such
operation at work. I have since used the example in “Righting
Wrongs,” in Nicholas Owen, ed. Human Rights,
Human Wrongs, Oxford, 2003; and in “Ethics and Politics
in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” forthcoming
in Diacritics, June, 2004, n.p. Indeed,
much of what I spoke of in Toronto had been rehearsed in the earlier
essay, at greater length.
- I contrasted Melanie Klein and Jean Piaget here but that can now
be found in “Righting Wrongs.”
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