The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c10.s3.82

c10.s3.82

Of course—literacy and school attendance are not the same thing. They are not the same even now. But that is the realm of the imponderable and not worth arguing. If it comes to that, just now I rank mere literacy low enough. It seems to me we are in for a rotten ten years of struggle to keep any sort of decency alive. I may be overdepressed; but I saw the utter wash that the ‘literate’ populace of the United States read as their only gain from education, and I come back to this country to find that the weeklies are dying or recently dead, and that Daily Mail, Daily Express, and the infamous Sunday popular papers are about all the reading that Demos does. I believe the most popular weekly is ‘Competitions’, which guides the huge mob whose sole intellectual recreation (an absorbing and costly one) is making ‘bullets’ or cross-word puzzles (sending up six-pence a time). On the other hand, Akbar was ‘illiterate’.