#textum

“Quien escribe, teje. Texto proviene del latín, ‘textum’ que significa tejido. Con hilos de palabras vamos diciendo, con hilos de tiempo vamos viviendo. Los textos son como nosotros: tejidos que andan”

i cani. baubanw

Text, a term drawn upon the Latin ‘textile’ and ‘texture’, was used to indicate the state of ‘being woven together.’ Texts, be it the ‘sutra-path’ of Panini or the ancient Roman ‘textum’ or the early American text ‘The New England Primer’ or the colonial textbooks discussed by Dharampal in his work on pre-colonial education, all had a common purpose. It was to weave the minds of children together into a dominant national or cultural narrative. All textbooks are based on this principle, in both good and bad times. Mahatma Gandhi had, therefore, written in 1937 that “if textbooks alone are to be used as vehicle of knowledge, the living presence of a teacher’s mind will have no space in education.”