by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

published in 1947

It was possible for Aristotle,¹ starting from the premise that a man, being actually cultured, may also become literate, to ask whether there is a necessary or merely an accidental connection of literacy with culture. Such a question can hardly arise for us, to whom illiteracy implies, as a matter of course, ignorance, backwardness, unfitness for self-government: for us, unlettered peoples are uncivilized peoples, and vice versa—as a recent publisher’s blurb expresses it: “The greatest force in civilization is the collective wisdom of a literate people.”

There are reasons for this point of view; they inhere in the distinction of a people, or folk, from a proletariat, that of a social organism from a human ant heap. For a proletariat, literacy is a practical and cultural necessity. We may remark in passing that necessities are not always goods in themselves, out of their context; some, like wooden legs, are advantageous only to men already maimed. However that may be, it remains that literacy is a necessity for us, and from both points of view; (1) because our industrial system can only be operated and profits can only be made by men provided with at least an elementary knowledge of the “three R’s”; and (2) because, where there is no longer any necessary connection between one’s “skill” (now a timesaving “economy of motion” rather than a control of the product) and one’s “wisdom,” the possibility of culture depends so much on our ability to read the best books. We say “possibility” here because, whereas the literacy actually produced by compulsory mass education often involves little or no more than an ability and the will to read the newspapers and advertisements, an actually cultured man under these conditions will be one who has studied many books in many languages, and this is not a kind of knowledge that can be handed out to everyone under “compulsion” (even if any nation could afford the needed quantity and quality of teachers) or that could be acquired by everyone, however ambitious.

We have allowed that in industrial societies, where it is assumed that man is made for commerce and where men are cultured, if at all, in spite of rather than because of their environment, literacy is a necessary skill. It will naturally follow that if, on the principle that misery loves company, we are planning to industrialize the rest of the world, we are also in duty bound to train it in Basic English, or words to that effect—American is already a language of exclusively external relationships, a tradesman’s tongue—lest the other peoples should be unable to compete effectively with us. Competition is the life of trade, and gangsters must have rivals.

In the present article we are concerned with something else, viz., the assumption that, even for societies not yet industrialized, literacy is “an unqualified good and an indispensible condition of culture.”² The vast majority of the world’s population is still unindustrialized and unlettered, and there are peoples still “unspoiled” (in the interior of Borneo): but the average American who knows of no other way of living than his own, judges that “unlettered” means “uncultured,” as if this majority consisted only of a depressed class in the context of his own environment. It is because of this, as well as for some meaner reasons, not unrelated to “imperial” interests, that when we propose not merely to exploit but also to educate “the lesser breeds without the [i.e. our] law” we inflict upon them profound, and often lethal, injuries. We say “lethal” rather than “fatal” here because it is precisely a destruction of their memories that is involved. We overlook that “education” is never creative, but a two-edged weapon, always destructive; whether of ignorance or of knowledge depending upon the educator’s wisdom or folly. Too often fools rush in where angels might fear to tread.

As against the complacent prejudice we shall essay to show (1) that there is no necessary connection of literacy with culture, and (2) that to impose our literacy (and our contemporary “literature”) upon a cultured but illiterate people is to destroy their culture in the name of our own. For the sake of brevity we shall assume without argument that “culture” implies an ideal quality and a good form that can be realized by all men irrespective of condition: and, since we are treating of culture chiefly as expressed in words, we shall identify culture with “poetry”; not having in view the kind of poetry that nowadays babbles of green fields or that merely reflects social behavior or our private reactions to passing events, but with reference to that whole class of prophetic literature that includes the Bible, the Vedas, the Edda, the great epics, and in general the world’s “best books,” and the most philosophical if we agree with Plato that “wonder is the beginning of philosophy.” Of these “books” many existed long before they were written down, many have never been written down, and others have been or will be lost.

We shall have now to make some quotations from the works of men whose “culture” cannot be called in question; for while the merely literate are often very proud of their literacy, such as it is, it is only by men who are “not only literate but also cultured” that it has been widely recognized that “letters” at their best are only a means to an end and never an end in themselves, or, indeed, that “the letter kills.” A “literary” man, if ever there was one, the late Professor G. L. Kittredge writes:³ “It requires a combined effort of the reason and the imagination to conceive a poet as a person who cannot write, singing or reciting his verses to an audience that cannot read … The ability of oral tradition to transmit great masses of verse for hundreds of years is proved and admitted … To this oral literature, as the French call it, education is no friend. Culture destroys it, sometimes with amazing rapidity. When a nation begins to read … what was once the possession of the folk as a whole, becomes the heritage of the illiterate only, and soon, unless it is gathered up by the antiquary, vanishes altogether.” Mark, too, that this oral literature once belonged “to the whole people … the community whose intellectual interests are the same from the top of the social structure to the bottom,” while in the reading society it is accessible only to antiquaries, and is no longer bound up with everyday life. A point of further importance is this: that the traditional oral literatures interested not only all classes, but also all ages of the population; while the books that are nowadays written expressly “for children” are such as no mature mind could tolerate; it is now only the comic strips that appeal alike to children who have been given nothing better and at the same time to “adults” who have never grown up.

It is in just the same way that music is thrown away; folk songs are lost to the people at the same time that they are collected and “put in a bag”; and in the same way that the “preservation” of a people’s art in folk museums is a funeral rite, for preservatives are only necessary when the patient has already died. Nor must we suppose that “community singing” can take the place of folk song; its level can be no higher than that of the Basic English in which our undergraduates must be similarly drilled, if they are to understand even the language of their elementary textbooks.

In other words, “Universal compulsory education, of the type introduced at the end of the last century, has not fulfilled expectations by producing happier and more effective citizens; on the contrary, it has created readers of the yellow press and cinemagoers” (Karl Otten). A master who can himself not only read, but also write good classical Latin and Greek, remarks that “there is no doubt of the quantitative increase in literacy of a kind, and amid the general satisfaction that something is being multiplied it escapes enquiry whether the something is profit or deficit.” He is discussing only the “worst effects” of enforced literacy, and concludes: “Learning and wisdom have often been divided; perhaps the clearest result of modern literacy has been to maintain and enlarge the gulf.”

Douglas Hyde remarks that “in vain have disinterested visitors opened wide eyes of astonishment at schoolmasters who knew no Irish being appointed to teach pupils who knew no English … Intelligent children endowed with a vocabulary in every day use of about three thousand words enter the Schools of the Chief Commissioner, to come out at the end with their natural vivacity gone, their intelligence almost completely sapped, their splendid command of their native language lost forever, and a vocabulary of five or six hundred English words, badly pronounced and barbarously employed, substituted for it … Story, lay, poem, song, aphorism, proverb, and the unique stock in trade of an Irish speaker’s mind, is gone forever, and replaced by nothing … The children are taught, if nothing else, to be ashamed of their own parents, ashamed of their own nationality, ashamed of their own names … It is a remarkable system of ‘education’”⁴—this system that you, “civilized and literate” Americans, have inflicted upon your own Amerindians, and that all imperial races are still inflicting upon their subjected peoples, and would like to impose upon their allies—the Chinese, for example.

The problem involved is both of languages and what is said in them. As for language, let us bear in mind, in the first place, that no such thing as a “primitive language,” in the sense of one having a limited vocabulary fitted only to express the simplest external relationships, is known. Much rather, that is a condition to which, under certain circumstances and as the result of “nothing-morist” philosophies, languages tend, rather than one from which they originate; for example, 90 per cent of our American “literacy” is a two-syllabled affair.⁵

In the seventeenth century Robert Knox said of the Sinhalese that “their ordinary Plow-men and Husbandmen do speak elegantly, and are full of complement. And there is no difference of ability and speech of a Country-man and a Courtier.”⁶ Abundant testimony to the like effect could be cited from all over the world. Thus of Gaelic, J. F. Campbell wrote, “I am inclined to think that dialect the best which is spoken by the most illiterate in the islands …men with clear heads and wonderful memories, generally very poor and old, living in remote corners of remote islands, and speaking only Gaelic,”⁷ and he quotes Hector Maclean, who says that the loss of their oral literature is due “partly to reading … partly to bigoted religious ideas, and partly to narrow utilitarian views”—which are, precisely, the three typical forms in which modern civilization impresses itself upon the older cultures. Alexander Carmichael says that “the people of Lews, like the people of the Highlands and Islands generally, carry the Scriptures in their minds and apply them in their speech … Perhaps no people had a fuller ritual of song and story, of secular rite and religious ceremony … than the illunderstood and so-called illiterate Highlanders of Scotland.”⁸

St. Barbe Baker tells us that in Central Africa “my trusted friend and companion was an old man who could not read or write, though well versed in stories of the past … The old chiefs listened enthralled … Under the present system of education there is grave risk that much of this may be lost.”⁹ W. G. Archer points out that “unlike the English system in which one could pass one’s life without coming into contact with poetry, the Uraon tribal system uses poetry as a vital appendix to dancing, marriages and the cultivation of a crop—functions in which all Uraons join as a part of their tribal life,” adding that “if we have to single out the factor which caused the decline of English village culture, we should have to say it was literacy.”¹⁰ In an older England, as Prior and Gardner remind us, “even the ignorant and unlettered man could read the meaning of sculptures that now only trained archeologists can interpret.”¹¹

The anthropologist Paul Radin points out that “the distortion in our whole psychic life and in our whole apperception of the external realities produced by the invention of the alphabet, the whole tendency of which has been to elevate thought and thinking to the 57 The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy rank of the exclusive proof of all verities, never occurred among primitive peoples,” adding that “it must be explicitly recognized that in temperament and in capacity for logical and symbolical thought, there is no difference between civilized and primitive man,” and as to “progress,” that none in ethnology will ever be achieved “until scholars rid themselves, once and for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses an evolutionary history; until they realize that certain ideas and certain concepts are as ultimate for man”¹² as his physical constitution. “The distinction of peoples in a state of nature from civilized peoples can no longer be maintained.”¹³

We have so far considered only the dicta of literary men. A really “savage” situation and point of view are recorded by Tom Harrisson, from the New Hebrides. “The children are educated by listening and watching … Without writing, memory is perfect, tradition exact. The growing child is taught all that is known … Intangible things cooperate in every effort of making, from conception to canoe-building … Songs are a form of story-telling … The lay-out and content in the thousand myths which every child learns (often word perfect, and one story may last for hours) are a whole library … the hearers are held in a web of spun words”; they converse together “with that accuracy and pattern of beauty in words that we have lost.” And what do they think of us? “The natives easily learn to write after white impact. They regard it as a curious and useless performance. They say: ‘Cannot a man remember and speak?’”¹⁴ They consider us “mad,” and may be right.

When we set out to “educate” the South Sea Islanders it is generally in order to make them more useful to ourselves (this was admittedly the beginning of “English education” in India), or to “convert” them to our way of thinking; not having in view to introduce them to Plato. But if we or they should happen upon Plato, it might startle both to find that their protest, “Cannot a man remember?” is also his.¹⁵ “For,” he says, “this invention [of letters] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not exercise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without teaching, and will therefore seem to know many things [Professor E. K. Rand’s “more and more of less and less”], when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise but only wiseacres.” He goes on to say that there is another kind of “word,” of higher origin and greater power than the written (or as we should say, the printed word) and maintains that the wise man, “when in earnest, will not write in ink” dead words that cannot teach the truth effectively, but will sow the seeds of wisdom in souls that are able to receive them and so “to pass them on forever.”

There is nothing strange or peculiar in Plato’s point of view; it is one, for example, with which every cultured Indian unaffected by modern European influences would agree wholly. It will suffice to cite that great scholar of Indian languages, Sir George A. Grierson, who says that “the ancient Indian system by which literature is recorded not on paper but on the memory, and carried down from generation to generation of teachers and pupils, is still [1920] in complete survival in Kashmir. Such fleshly tables of the heart are often more trustworthy than birch bark or paper manuscripts. The reciters, even when learned Pandits, take every care to deliver the messages word for word,” and records taken down from professional storytellers are thus “in some respects more valuable than any written manuscript.”¹⁶

From the Indian point of view a man can only be said to know what he knows by heart; what he must go to a book to be reminded of, he merely knows of. There are hundreds of thousands of Indians even now who daily repeat from knowledge by heart either the whole or some large part of the Bhagavad Gîtâ; others more learned can recite hundreds of thousands of verses of longer texts. It was from a traveling village singer in Kashmir that I first heard sung the Odes of the classical Persian poet, Jalâlu’d-Dîn Rûmî. From the earliest times, Indians have thought of the learned man, not as one who has read much, but as one who has been profoundly taught. It is much rather from a master than from any book that wisdom can be learned. We come now to the last part of our problem, which has to do with the characteristic preoccupations of the oral and the written literature; for although no hard and fast line can be drawn between them, there is a qualitative and thematic distinction, as between literatures that were originally oral and those that are created, so to speak, on paper—”In the beginning was the WORD.” The distinction is largely of poetry from prose and myth from fact. The quality of oral literature is essentially poetical, its content essentially mythical, and its preoccupation with the spiritual adventures of heroes: the quality of originally written literature is essentially prosaic, its content literal, and its preoccupation with secular events and with personalities. In saying “poetical” we mean to imply “mantic,” and are naturally taking for granted that the “poetic” is a literary quality, and not merely a literary (versified) form. Contemporary poetry is essentially and inevitably of the same caliber as modern prose; both are equally opinionated, and the best in either embodies a few “happy thoughts” rather than any certainty. As a famous gloss expresses it, “Unbelief is for the mob.” We who can call an art “significant,” knowing not of what, are also proud to “progress,” we know not whither.

Plato maintains that one who is in earnest will not write, but teach; and that if the wise man writes at all, it will be either only for amusement—mere “belles lettres”—or to provide reminders for himself when his memory is weakened by old age. We know exactly what Plato means by the words “in earnest”; it is not about human affairs or personalities, but about the eternal verities, the nature of real being, and the nourishment of our immortal part, that the wise man will be in earnest. Our mortal part can survive “by bread alone,” but it is by the Myth that our Inner Man is fed; or, if we substitute for the true myths the propagandist myths of “race,” “uplift,” “progress,” and “civilizing mission,” the Inner Man starves. The written text, as Plato says, can serve those whose memories have been weakened by old age. Thus it is that in the senility of culture we have found it necessary to “preserve” the masterpieces of art in museums, and at the same time to record in writing and so also to “preserve” (if only for scholars) as much as can be “collected” of oral literatures that would otherwise be lost forever; and this must be done before it is too late.

All serious students of human societies are agreed that agriculture and handicraft are essential foundations of any civilization; the primary meaning of the word being that of making a home for oneself. But, as Albert Schweitzer says, “We proceed as if not agriculture and handicraft, but reading and writing were the beginning of civilization,” and, “from schools which are mere copies of those of Europe they [“natives”] are turned out as ‘educated’ persons, that is, who think themselves superior to manual work, and want to follow only commercial or intellectual callings those who go through the schools are mostly lost to agriculture and handicraft.”¹⁷ As that great missionary, Charles Johnson of Zululand, also said, “the central idea [of the mission schools] was to prize individuals off the mass of the national life.”

Our literary figures of thought, for example, the notions of “culture” (analogous to agriculture), “wisdom” (originally “skill”), and “asceticism” (originally “hard work”), are derived from the productive and constructive arts; for, as St. Bonaventura says, “There is nothing therein which does not bespeak a true wisdom, and it is for this reason that Holy Scripture very properly makes use of such similes.”¹⁸ In normal societies, the necessary labors of production and construction are no mere “jobs,” but also rites, and the poetry and music that are associated with them are a kind of liturgy. The “lesser mysteries” of the crafts are a natural preparation for the greater “mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.” But for us, who can no longer think in terms of Plato’s divine “justice” of which the social aspect is vocational, that Christ was a carpenter and the son of a carpenter was only an historical accident; we read, but do not understand that where we speak of primary matter as “wood,” we must also speak of Him “through whom all things were made” as a “carpenter.” At the best, we interpret the classical figures of thought, not in their universality but as figures of speech invented by individual authors. Where literacy becomes an only skill, “the collective wisdom of a literate people” may be only a collective ignorance— while “backward communities are the oral libraries of the world’s ancient cultures.”¹⁹

The purpose of our educational activities abroad is to assimilate our pupils to our ways of thinking and living. It is not easy for any foreign teacher to acknowledge Ruskin’s truth, that there is one way only to help others, and that that is, not to train them in our way of living (however bigoted our faith in it may be), but to find out what they have been trying to do, and were doing before we came, and if possible help them to do it better. Some Jesuit missionaries in China are actually sent to remote villages and required to earn their living there by the practice of an indigenous craft for at least two years before they are allowed to teach at all. Some such condition as this ought to be imposed upon all foreign teachers, whether in mission or government schools. How dare we forget that we are dealing with peoples “whose intellectual interests are the same from the top of the social structure to the bottom,” and for whom our unfortunate distinctions of religious from secular learning, fine from applied art, and significance from use have not yet been made? When we have introduced these distinctions and have divided an “educated” from a still “illiterate” class, it is to the latter that we must turn if we want to study the language, the poetry, and the whole culture of these peoples, “before it is too late.”

In speaking of a “proselytizing fury” in a former article I had not only in view the activities of professed missionaries but more generally those of everyone bent by the weight of the white man’s burden and anxious to confer the “blessings” of our civilization upon others. What lies below this fury, of which our punitive expeditions and “wars of pacification” are only more evident manifestations? It would not be too much to say that our educational activities abroad (a word that must be taken to include the American Indian reservations) are motivated by an intention to destroy existing cultures. And that is not only, I think, because of our conviction of the absolute superiority of our Kultur, and consequent contempt and hatred for whatever else we have not understood all those for whom the economic motive is not decisive, but grounded in an unconscious and deep-rooted envy of the serenity and leisure that we cannot help but recognize in people whom we call “unspoiled.” It irks us that these others, who are neither, as we are, industrialized nor, as we are, “democratic,” should nevertheless be contented; we feel bound to discontent them, and especially to discontent their women, who might learn from us to work in factories or to find careers. I used the word Kultur deliberately just now, because there is not much real difference between the Germans’ will to enforce their culture upon the backward races of the rest of Europe and our determination to enforce our own upon the rest of the world; the methods employed in their case may be more evidently brutal, but the kind of will involved is the same.²⁰ As I implied above, that “misery loves company” is the true and unacknowledged basis of our will to create a brave new world of uniformly literate mechanics. This was recently repeated to a group of young American workmen, one of whom responded, “And are we miserable!”

But however we may be whistling in the dark when we pride ourselves upon “the collective wisdom of a literate people,” regardless of what is read by the “literates,” the primary concern of the present essay is not with the limitations and defects of modern Western education in situ, but with the spread of an education of this type elsewhere. Our real concern is with the fallacy involved in the attachment of an absolute value to literacy, and the very dangerous consequences that are involved in the setting up of “literacy” as a standard by which to measure the cultures of unlettered peoples. Our blind faith in literacy not only obscures for us the significance of other skills, so that we care not under what subhuman conditions a man may have to learn his living, if only he can read, no matter what, in his hours of leisure; it is also one of the fundamental grounds of inter-racial prejudice and becomes a prime factor in the spiritual impoverishment of all the “backward” people whom we propose to “civilize.”

Notes

1. Metaphysics, VI: 2, 4, and XI: 8, 12. “Reading, for a man devoid of prior-understanding, is like a blind man’s looking in a mirror” (Garuda Purâna, XVI: 82).

2. Walter Shewring, “Literacy,” in the Dictionary of World Literature, 1943. “We are becoming culturally illiterate faster than all these agencies are managing to make us literate in the use of the potentialities of the culture” (Robert S. Lynd, in Knowledge for What?). Professor John U. Nef of Chicago, speaking at Hamline University in 1944, remarked: “In spite of the alleged great spread of literacy [in America]… the proportion of the population who can communicate with each other on a relatively high level of discourse is very much smaller than it was.” A recent study sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching found that “the average senior in six colleges recognized only 61 out of 100 words in familiar use by educated people”! In view of all the facts, it is indeed astonishing to find Lord Raglan saying: “By savage I mean illiterate” (in the Rationalist Annual, 1946, p. 43). There was a time, indeed, when the English bourgeoisie thought of the Gaelic Highlanders as “savages”; but from an anthropologist one would expect a refutation of such “myths,” rather than their revival!

3. F. G. Childe, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Introduction by G. L. Kittredge. Cf. W. W. Comfort, Chrétien de Troyes (Everyman’s Library), Introduction: Chrétien’s poetry “was intended for a society that was still homogeneous, and to it at the outset doubtless all classes of the population listened with equal interest.” Nothing of this kind is or can be achieved by the organized and compulsory education of today—”a province of its own, detached from life” with its “atmosphere of intense boredom that damps the vitality of the young” and of which “the result is: the young people do not know anything really well,” or as “it would be more exact to say, they do not know what knowledge is,” which “explains the dangerous gullibility which propaganda exploits” (Erich Meissner, Germany in Peril, 1942, pp. 47, 48).

4. Douglas Hyde, Literary History of Ireland, 1903, p. 633.

5. American is already “a one-dimensional public language, a language oriented to the description of external aspects of behavior, weak in overtones … our words lack … the formal precision which comes from awareness of past and different usage” (Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry, 1942, p.82). Any author who uses words precisely is liable to be misunderstood. “Perhaps at no other time have men been so knowing and yet so unaware, so burdened with purposes and so purposeless, so disillusioned and so completely the victims of illusion. This strange contradiction pervades our entire modern culture, our science and our philosophy, our literature and our art” (W. M. Urban, The Intelligible World, 1929, p. 172). Under such conditions, ability to read a printed page becomes a mere trick, and is no guarantee whatever of power to grasp or to communicate ideas.

6. Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 1681 (1911 ed., p.168).

7. J. F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1890 ed., pp. v, xxiii, cxxii).

8. Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, Vol. I, 1900, pp. xxiii, xxix. Cf. J. G. Mackay, More West Highland Tales, 1940, General Preface: “The poorest classes generally speak the language admirably … Some recited thousands of lines of ancient heroic poems … Another cause of the fragmentary character of some tales is the obliterating effect of modern civilization”; and J. Watson, ibid., Introduction: “This intellectual inheritance … this ancient culture extended over all the north and northerly midlands of Scotland. The people who possessed this culture may have been, and usually were, unlettered. They were far from being uneducated. It is sad to think that its decay has been partly due to the schools and the Church!” It is, in fact, precisely by “the schools and the Church” that the decay of cultures all over the world has been hastened in the last hundred years. H. J. Massingham in This Plot of Earth (1944, p. 233) tells of “the old man, Seonardh Coinbeul, who could neither read nor write and carried 4500 lines of his own bardic composition in his head, together with all manner of songs and stories.” A. Solonylsin in the Asiatic Review (NS. XLI, Jan., 1945, p. 86) remarks that the recording of the Kirghiz epic is still incomplete, although over 1,100,000 lines have already been taken down by the Kirghiz Research Institute—”Bards who recite the ‘Manas’—or ‘Manaschi’—have phenomenal memories in addition to poetic talent. Only this can explain the fact that hundreds of thousands of verses have been handed down orally.” A writer reviewing Manas, Kirghiski Narodni Epos in the Journal of American Folklore, 58, 1945, p. 65, observes that “general education has already done much to remove the raison d’être of the minstrel’s position in tribal life … With acculturation becoming a rolling Juggernaut it is not surprising that what remains of epic singing may soon degenerate into an artificial and ostentatiously national publicity device.”

9. R. St. Barbe Baker, Africa Drums, 1942, p. 145.

10. W. G. Archer, The Blue Grove, 1940, Preface; and in JBORS, Vol. XXIX, p. 68.

11. Edward Schröder Prior and Arthur Gardner, An Account of Medieval Figure Sculpture in England, 1912, p. 25.

12. Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1927.

13. J. Strzygowski, Spüren indogermanische Glaubens in der bildenden Kunst, 1936, p. 344.

14. Tom Harrisson, Savage Civilization, 1937, pp. 45, 344, 351, 353.

15. Plato, Phaedrus, 275 f. Cf. H. Gauss, Plato’s Conception of Philosophy, 1937, pp. 262–5.

16. Sir George A. Grierson, Lallâ Vâkyâni, 1920, p. 3.

17. Albert Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest.

18. De reductione artium ad theologiam, 14.

19. N. K. Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy, 1942, Preface, further, “The experience of exclusively literate communities is too narrow.” “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (II Timothy 3:7)!

20. Modern “education” imposed upon traditional cultures (e.g. Gaelic, Indian, Polynesian, American Indian) is only less deliberately, not less actually, destructive than the Nazi destruction of Polish libraries, which was intended to wipe out their racial memories; the Germans acted consciously, but we who Anglicize or Americanize or Frenchify are driven by a rancor that we do not recognize and could not confess. This rancor is, in fact, our reaction to a superiority that we resent and therefore would like to destroy.