New Delhi, July 22 -- I watched an eight-year-old boy 'read' a page of poetry from his Hindi textbook. He spoke fluently, eyes moving across the page, finger tracking the line. Taking the book from him, I opened a page randomly and asked him to read. The child was silent. He had not been reading at all, but had memorized the poem and was performing it using the picture on the page as a cue. He could barely read from the random page.

This is not unusual in Indian schools. It is what happens when an abstraction becomes so attractive that it becomes the dominant orthodoxy. This is another cautionary tale from education, building on my last column where I wrote about another such dogma-constructivism.

This idea is called the 'whole language...