Amol Rajan
speaker
3,997 appearances
23 recordings
6 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Amol Rajan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.
Appearances
What was the store of knowledge?
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I mean, because if the idea of everyone being able to read is a very recent phenomenon, only a few centuries old, really.
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If you think about, for instance, the idea of Islamic education in sort of 8th century Baghdad, which was this wonderful fountain of geometry and algebra.
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How are people conveying that information?
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Is it all much more through a kind of vocal culture and memory?
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as long as your memory isn't fading, and there's some evidence that memory does fade amongst people who get to a certain age, but the older you are, the more, you know, lived memory you have of things, and also the more kind of time you've had to submit other things to memory.
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So you have this kind of reverence of the elders.
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What are the other kind of key moments then that go from the kind of mid 18th century, the spread of reading, the use of reading, particularly by an elite who kind of need it for bureaucracy and legal verification and so forth to kind of what happened in the late 19th, early 20th century, which is what we'd call mass literacy.
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And literacy then becomes a kind of form of mass enfranchisement.
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Suddenly people who are kind of not really involved in the public conversation can get involved and sort of be equipped with the same knowledge.
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And it's also quite clearly a major kind of social mobility device.
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You know, one of my biggest influences is a book called The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart.
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And he talks about growing up in the interwar years in Leeds.
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And he basically talks about literacy as a kind of form of escape from
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from the poverty and the grimness of those years but also a way of kind of talking on equal terms with all the posh people that run the country it's an amazing it's kind of i mean the word meritocracy is very very complicated but in terms of social mobility literacy did more for millions of people in this country and elsewhere than many other policies
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I've never thought about it in this context.
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It's so interesting talking to you about it, that Thomas Paine's revolutionary writings, The Rights of Man or Common Sense and Other Writings, it would have been so exhilarating for those who were minded to throw off monarchies and to campaign for revolution.
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Book would have been a kind of new technology.
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It would have been like the smartphone of today.
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Here's this thing you can hold and it's got words and they convey information.
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Showing 281–300 of 3,997 · page 15 of 200
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