Singapore, are you not my country?

America by Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.

I can't stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb

I don't feel good don't bother me.

I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I'm sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?

I'm trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for

murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.

I won't say the Lord's Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over

from Russia.

I'm addressing you.

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie

producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven't got a chinaman's chance.

I'd better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals

an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and

twentyfivethousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in

my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his

automobiles more so they're all different sexes

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they

sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the

speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the

workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party

was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother

Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have

been a spy.

America you don're really want to go to war.

America it's them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take

our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our

auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.

Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

America is this correct?

I'd better get right down to the job.

It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts

factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Literature, Culture, and Education

This week's readings bring together the concepts of "culture" and "education" in relation to learning theories. Feel free to write about anything in response to anything that interests you in the articles...

An article from The 99 Percent Plan

SUNDAY, MAR 4, 2012 11:00 PM SGT

Beyond the free market BY K. SABEEL RAHMAN

To shape a fairer economy, we must reclaim the language of freedom. We can start by looking to Brandeis and Dewey.

Read more ... http://www.salon.com/2012/03/04/beyond_the_free_market/?source=newsletter

I read all your comments with great interest and realized what all I had missed in preparing for my presentation on Monday. As I write now, I believe I am standing on a storehouse of information trying to augment and reinforce what has been covered in the past few weeks.

I think as teachers, we are constantly faced with the dilemma about what kind of cultural values we wish to pass on to our students. After all, students look up to us. We are to them what the Statue of Liberty is to the immigrants who come to New York. However, the question here is whether we as role models can stand the true test of time, or whether we will be swayed by the winds of reason and social expectation?

In his writing, Minister Mentor Lee highlighted the role of the teacher in shaping the nation of tomorrow. He  mentioned how the stability of the country can be disrupted by the lack of “care, the attention and the inculcation of good responses, good habits and good attitudes.” given to “the bottom layer of average boys and girls”.

Booth refers to the ethical problems that teachers like Elizabeth Anne Leonard ( as cited in Booth) encounter in becoming role models for their students to emulate, “How ... can I encourage them to interrogate the academy and its power structures and simultaneously enjoy the experience of becoming a creator, a thinker?... [I]f I'm changing students how do I change them in ways that I feel are most useful to them".

I feel that to connect to a student we need to understand their world view and find a common thread that links both the educator and the student. In the movie, “Dangerous Minds”, we see how the teacher makes an earnest attempt to fuel the imagination of her students and ultimately succeeds in drawing them out of their apathy.

A book I feel can possibly inspire students to think for themselves is the book - Totto-Chan, the Little Girl at the Window by Japanese Television personality, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi.  
What I like about the book is the way in which it showcases the educational upbringing of a child in a nurturing environment. One particular incident is when Totto Chan is digging up the playground looking for her lost purse, her headmaster calmly tells her “You’ll put it all back when you’re finished, won’t you?”, instead of reprimanding her like an adult, “ What on earth are you doing!” I feel when students are allowed to make their own interpretations of the text within a loose framework; they are encouraged to grow more.

Culture - what for?

Hey everyone!

For Noel's sake, I thought i'd do a partial recap of our lesson on Monday. Brigit took us through many of the salient points and arguments in Michael Apple's wonderful article, and gave us a interesting example of an "ideologically-rigged" text in the form of a newspaper op-ed piece (aren't all ISA-produced texts ideologically rigged anyway?). Then she showed us (using a painting by Manet) how it was possible for the gifted and socially conscious artist to produce texts that were self-reflexive and reflective of the ways in which readers/audiences/viewers construct their own ideological biases in the act of interpretation. 

In the last part of our lesson, we extended the analysis further into our reading of Horace Miner's famous "anthropological" article on the Nacirema - a text that ingeniously conflates the discourses of science and art, fact and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, anthropology and literature, orientalism and post-colonialism, innocent wonder and cynical satire. My challenge at the end of it was: how can literature - and by extension, writers AND readers of literature - discover and apply the subversive/oppositional potentialities of Art? Is this our ethical responsibility - i.e. to read against the grain? To challenge hegemonic authority? To refuse complicity with the dominant culture? Or are we as EDUCATORS constrained to play our parts in this play of cultural assent and affirmation?

So here's the online task for this week (and hopefully, our blog will be a better place to talk freely about how we feel and think). Consider the words of Matthew Arnold (1869) in the article "Sweetness and Light" (which you read two weeks ago):

CULTURE "does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, - nourished, and not bound by them" (p. 226).

- Does Arnold have a valid point here? Or is he (blindly) on the side of "cultural domination"?

- If the best of literature is supposed to transmit "cultural literacy" (as E.D. Hirsch would have it), are we as good literature teachers not somehow complicit in the workings of cultural reproduction?

- Or can we, through our curriculum choices and pedagogical practices, be engaged in a process of cultural transformation? 

My Response to Rashmi's

If this sounds different to you that's because I edited it!


Like Rashmi, I was initially confused by the intentions of the writer. This made me wonder how readers of this report would know when and where to stop rejecting the words on the page (i.e. the 'narrative' as it is presented to them), and instead, begin to (re)build their own version of the story. When does this turning point occur and what are the potential signifiers (if any) that might "disrupt one's inclination to identify" with the anthropologist (Lewis 9), and instead, (re)construct an alternative narrative? The report  only becomes 'ironic' and/or 'parodic' when the reader (who is part of the 'discursive community') 'gets it'. The reader is thus complicit in the production of the 'alternative' narrative. Readers are therefore not just "produced as subjects by the texts they read" (Lewis 4), but they produce interpretations - this performative act is then a diachronic process that not only discloses the world they reside in but also produces the possibility of transformation. Parody and irony are then very powerful devices that facilitate this process within the space of a single narrative. 


Both Lewis and Booth emphasize the value of this performative act. For instance, Lewis argues that this recognition (of the 'limits of identification') leads to a  "creative reconstruction" that "addresses the social and political dimensions of the texts […] invit[ing] students to take pleasure in both the personal and the critical" (Lewis 9). Similarly, Booth in "The Ethics of Teaching Literature", suggests that teachers not only pick novels according to the needs of the students but also select novels with competing ideologies/systems in order to "inculcate the right kind of casuistry" (53). In both the Lewis's and Booth's examples, the writers highlight the "pleasure" (Lewis) and "excitement" (Booth) that comes with  'doing literature'. 'Doing literature' is thus addictive and fun - but is this a 'good' kind addiction? What are  the consequences of the 'possibility of transformation'? Parody, according to Dentith, "has the paradoxical effect of preserving the very text that it seeks to destroy" and this can create some "odd effects". While I'm not sure what Dentith means by "odd effects", the word 'effect' still suggests to me that it is, as I've mentioned before, 'productive' though obviously not in the 'positive' sense of the word. Similarly, Lewis's "creative reconstruction" (emphasis mine) may be both a 'positive' and 'negative' one, while Booth's does not go on to specify what this 'right' kind of casuistry may be (we know he does not mean the alternative definition of casuistry which is 'unsound reasoning') but there still remains the possibility of the production of moral paradigms that are not align with the moral values that most teachers hope to teach/reproduce. The irony it seems lies in the system itself - how can such processes (which some even claim to 'free'/'democratize' the individual) promote democratic values of "equality" and "justice" for all when we know for a fact that real democracy comes at the price of the freedoms of other members (and animals?) of society? How can (literature) education create the possibility for friendship and kindness (the equal kind based neither on the materiality of the bodies nor on 'universal values')? 

A response to " Body ritual among Nacirema"

I liked this piece because it was thought provoking and humorous. The anthropologist tries to understand  the rituals and culture  by living with a tribe. The author adopts a serious tone in describing the rituals of the so-called nacirema. On one level, it is amusing as we all know the author is trying to parody the rituals of the tribe. However, the tone used is quite matter of fact. At times, I was confused by the intention of the author as his tone was neutral and unbiased. In order to understand the piece, I tried to find out more about this tribe and realized that the author had deliberately corrupted or subverted words to mock the rituals of the Americans. E.g ospital without the 'H'.  Personally, I feel the author sees these urban rituals as part of the American  identity that cannot be totally ignored. In other words, these "exotic" rituals define and complete a tribe member's perception of life. 

The panoptic interaction order?

Discourse moves in the facilitation of a classroom discussion:

1.     establish norms (e.g. Grice’s maxims)

2.     invite participation

3.     compel participation (“cold calls”)

4.     evaluate participants’ comments

5.     wait for responses (“intuitively” assess appropriate wait time)

6.     probe for explanations, clarifications and elaborations

7.     clarify and summarize participants’ ideas

8.     repeat, highlight, or emphasize salient points

9.     make relevant and insightful links between participants’ comments

10.                         (re)direct and (re)distribute turn-taking

11.                        respond and participate in ways that model quality of participation

12.                        banter; insert appropriate witticisms

13.                        promote self-forgetful / unself-conscious participation

14.                        maintain lively pace of conversation, adroitly pacing students’ interactions

Setting the "rules" for online asynchronous discussions/conferences

Jürgen Habermas on Communicative Action (Habermas, 1970, 1971, 1985)

What conditions are required when people enter into an ideal speech situation? 

Firstly, people expect that the speech situation will honor the true interests of all participants in the discussion:
- all participants must receive an equal distribution of opportunities to select and use speech acts;
- all participants must have an equal chance to initiate and maintain discourse;
- all participants must have an equal chance to advance their points of view, to question ideas, and to give reasons for and against claims made in language.

Secondly, people expect that argument and debate will proceed without undue external pressures:
- all participants must accept that accidental or systematic constraints on discussion will play no part in it;
- all participants must be assured of an equal chance to express feelings, attitudes, and intentions;
- all participants must be assured of an equal chance to oppose, permit, command, instruct, forbid, and do any of the things that any other participants are entitled to do.

Thirdly, people expect that the force of argument will prevail – that the outcome of discussion will depend on the force of the better argument.

When these conditions are met, a democratic form of public discussion prevails over domination, manipulation, and control...

Assessment: A Heuristic

1. CONSTRUCT VALIDITY (~ Scope and Specificity and Accuracy)
What precisely does this question test?

a. Can the competencies assessed be categorized (roughly or clearly) into LITERARY KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, and DISPOSITIONS?

b. To what extent does the demonstration of "LITERARY KNOWLEDGE" require the thinking skills of RETRIEVAL/RECALL and/or UNDERSTANDING/COMPREHENSION?

c. To what extent does the demonstration of "LITERARY SKILLS" demand the higher-order thinking skills (or "critical thinking skills) of APPLICATION, ANALYSIS, SYNTHESIS, EVALUATION, and CREATION?

d. To what extent does the demonstration of "LITERARY DISPOSITIONS" require the sincere exercise of EMPATHY, PERSPECTIVE-TAKING, MORAL/ETHICAL REFLECTION, HONEST SELF-EVALUATION (through "personal response")?

e. Does the question deliberately lend itself to the demonstration of a RANGE of competencies (so as to differentiate the "stronger" from the "weaker" answers?

f. Does the wording of the question lend itself unintentionally to the demonstration of non-specific or non-specified competencies?

g. Does the question fairly assess what the teacher has taught for the test/exams?


2. CONSEQUENTIAL VALIDITY (~ Aims: Explicit & Implicit, Intended & Unintended)
What are the consequences of the test? Whose interests does the test serve?

a. Is the test used explicitly for FORMATIVE and/or SUMMATIVE purposes?

b. Will the test have an unintended or intended PUNITIVE effect on the test-taker?

c. Does the test unintentionally or intentionally discriminate against certain test-takers on the basis of CULTURAL IDENTITY and EXPERIENCES (related to language, ethnicity, class, age, gender, sexual orientation, religion)?

d. Does the ideological framework in which the test is embedded recognize, reward, and promote certain educational outcomes above others? (or simply: Does the test "objectively" privilege certain outcomes over others?)

e. To what extent will the examiner's (teacher's) feedback on the test enable or encourage further learning  and improvement?

f. What might be the cognitive and affective effects of the examiner's feedback?

from The Intelligent Singaporean website

"Why I hate teaching"
A teacher's blog

"The Corporate Stranglehold on Education" by Henry Giroux

Extracted from WWW.Counterpunch.org

SEPTEMBER 08, 2009

Is Higher Education in Need of a Moral Bailout?

The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

by HENRY A. GIROUX

As the school year begins, colleges and universities in North America are doing everything possible to attract students, including making themselves over in the image of a high-end mall or a cool brand name. Some institutions are giving students free Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods. Others are building attractive athletic facilities, developing more retail stores on campus, and providing plenty of specialized coffee shops. Some welcome this change as a brilliant market strategy while others believe that any face lift will improve the often stodgy academic image many colleges project. 

Even as more and more students are excluded from a decent higher education because of the recession, educators seem less concerned about the plight of poor students than they do about how they can find the right brand to sell themselves to attract new students. But there is more at work here than the development of a new campus aesthetic or a recognition that students are now considered clients who represent an important market niche.

There is also the move on the part of many universities towards embracing  market mechanisms as a way of redefining almost every aspect of university life–in spite of the failure and excesses of this system as exemplified in the Bernie Madoff scandal, outrageous executive bonuses, financial corruption, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the corporate greed that caused the current economic recession. Rather than challenge the economic irresponsibility, ecological damage, and human suffering, and culture of cruelty unleashed by free market fundamentalism, higher education appears to be one of its staunchest defenders, uncritically embracing a view of itself based on a market model of the academy.   

It seems that few educators have recognized that universities are in need of a moral bailout given that they are embracing the very market values, identities, and social relations that not only perpetuated the cut-throat values that caused the economic crisis, but also put many of them in the dire financial crisis they are currently experiencing.  The corporate stranglehold over higher education  gets stronger regardless of how devalued market fundamentalism has become during one of the greatest economic crisis the United States has ever experienced. Strapped for money and increasingly defined in the language of corporate culture, many universities seem less interested in higher learning than in becoming licensed storefronts for brand name corporations–selling space, buildings, and endowed chairs to rich corporate donors.  Not surprisingly, students are now referred to as “customers,” while some university presidents even argue that professors be labeled as “academic entrepreneurs.”  Instead of using their platforms to address important social issues, university presidents are now called CEOs and are viewed primarily as fund raisers.

In the age of money and profit, academic subjects gain stature almost exclusively through their exchange value on the market.  Twice as many students major in business studies than in any other major. The liberal arts increasingly appear to be merely ornamental, a dying vestige of an age not dominated by Gilded Age excess and disposability. Whereas the university was once prized as a place where students learned how to be engaged citizens educated in the knowledge, skills, values, and virtues of democracy, today they are trained to be workers and adept consumers. Educational value is now measured according to cost/benefit formulas, and the only rationality that matters is one of economic exchange.  

Education is increasingly reduced to a narrow instrumental logic, only recognizable as a form of training, just as teaching is removed from the language of social and moral responsibility, critical imagination, and civic courage. In the age of increasing specializations, pay for grades schemes, excessive instrumentalism, and an increasing contempt for critical thinking, higher education is producing new forms of political and civic illiteracy, turning out students who have little understanding of the complexities of the larger world, unaware of their power as social agents, and removed from those capacities that combine critique and a yearning for social justice,  knowledge and social change, learning and a compassion for others.   And the outcome can be seen in a growing generation of young people and adults who are barely literate, live in an utterly privatized world, and are either indifferent or complicit with a growing culture of cruelty.

As higher education is transformed into a business or increasingly militarized, young people find themselves on campuses that look more like malls or recruiting stations for the national security state.  Moreover, they are increasingly taught by professors who are hired on a contractual basis, have obscene work loads, and can barely make enough money to survive. Tenured faculty members are now called upon to generate grants, establish close partnerships with corporations, and teach courses that have practical value in the marketplace. What was once the hidden curriculum of many universities—the subordination of higher education to corporate values—has now become an open and much celebrated policy of both public and private higher education.  There is little in this vision of the university that imagines young people as critical citizens or critical agents,  educated to take seriously their role in addressing important social issues and bearing some responsibility for strengthening and deepening the reach of a real and substantive democracy. Addressing education as a democratic endeavour begins with the recognition that higher education is more than an investment opportunity, citizenship is about more than consuming, learning is about more than preparing for a job, and democracy is about more the false choices offered under a rigged corporate state and marketplace.

Higher education may be one of the few sites left in which students learn the knowledge and skills that enable them to not only mediate critically between democratic values and the demands of corporate power, but also to distinguish between identities founded on democratic principles and identities steeped in forms of competitive, unbridled individualism that celebrate self-interest, profit making, and greed. Put differently, higher education should neither confuse education with training nor should it suggest that the only obligation of citizenship is consuming.

Higher education is a hard-won democratic achievement and it is time that parents, faculty, students, alumni and concerned citizens reclaim higher education as a fundamental public good rather than merely a training ground for corporate interests, values, and profits.  Education is not only about issues of work and economics–as important as these may be, but also about matters of justice,  freedom, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change as well as the related issues of power, exclusion, and citizenship. Education at its best is about enabling students to take seriously questions about how they ought to live their lives, uphold the ideals of a just society, learn how to translate personal issues into public considerations, and act upon the promises of a strong democracy. These are educational and political issues and should be addressed as part of a broader concern for renewing the struggle for social justice and democracy.  Let’s give our students the education they deserve in a substantive democracy. Schooling offers more than the promise of a decent job, however elusive that has become; more importantly, it offers the promise of a just and democratic society.

HENRY A. GIROUX holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His most recent book is Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan

Facebook friend tally is associated with differences in brain structure

People with lots of Facebook friends have denser grey matter in three regions of the brain, a study suggests... 

ENGLISH LANGUAGE SYLLABUS 2001 For Primary and Secondary Schools

AIMS OF THE SYLLABUS (p. 4)

At the end of their primary and secondary education, pupils will be able to communicate effectively in English.

They will be able to:

• listen to, read and view with understanding, accuracy and critical appreciation, a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts from print, non-print and electronic sources.
• speak, write and make presentations in internationally acceptable English* that is grammatical, fluent and appropriate for purpose, audience, context and culture. At higher levels of proficiency, pupils will speak and write for academic purposes and creative expression, using language that is inventive and imaginative.

• think through, interpret and evaluate fiction and non-fiction texts from print and electronic sources to analyse how language is used to evoke responses and construct meaning; how information is presented; and how different modes of presentation create impact.
• interact effectively with people from their own or different cultures.

*Internationally acceptable English that is grammatical, fluent and appropriate for purpose, audience, context and culture’ refers to the formal register of English used in different parts of the world, that is, standard English. 

Curriculum Planning and Development Division, Ministry of Education, Singapore.
Year of Implementation: From 2001.

The rise of new technology is changing the way we think about language and the world...

MONDAY, OCT 10, 2011 3:00 AM SGT

The birth of the Google Translate era

The rise of new technology is changing the way we think about language and the world. An expert explains how

BY THOMAS ROGERS

"It’s a change that raises a number of bigger questions: Will automation completely replace human translation? Are we about to see the end of multilingualism? According to David Bellos, a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton and Booker Prize-winning translator, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon." READ MORE...

Practical Tips on Managing Classroom Incivility

From the UC Santa Cruz website

"What is Classroom Incivility?

Instructors identify various student behaviors as annoying, rude, and disruptive. These may be classified on a scale of relative severity:

• Annoyances, minor disruptions—Arriving late and leaving early, talking on cell phone, reading newspaper, side conversations, packing up noisily before end of class. Together, these offenses can add up to more than just an annoyance.
• Dominating discussion—The student who won’t let anyone else talk.
• Aggressive challenges of teacher—The student who takes up class time questioning your authority, expressing anger about grading, or generally undermining your ability to teach.
• Disputes between students; demeaning comments—When classroom discussion gets out of hand, or a student uses demeaning or stereotyping language."  Read more...

Check out another excellent practical article on "Managing Classroom Conflict."

“The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.”


TUESDAY, OCT 4, 2011 4:30 AM SGT

Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize

An American hasn't won in 20 years. The Academy finds our writers insular and self-involved -- and they're right

BY ALEXANDER NAZARYAN

Branding multimodal literacies

TUESDAY, OCT 4, 2011 8:30 AM SGT

Inside the branding process

We talk to creative pros about what they learned at a recent San Francisco design conference

BY STEPHANIE ORMA, IMPRINT

The International Portal of Teacher Education

Thousands of abstracts and reviews of the latest papers and research studies, published in the world's leading journals, are collected in one database in the International Teacher Education Content Portal.

Culture against Anarchy?

Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Minute on Indian Education" (1835)

"It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population."

~ ~ ~

"Let me remind you of Macaulay. He remains to me one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious for certain reasons which you know" - Lord Acton


Herbert Paul (ed.), Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone (George Allen, 1904), p. 210.