Some years later the British went down the same route, mainly to create clerks to run their empire. The British, as Sugata Mitra said in his remarkable 2013 TED lecture, set out to create a big computer with which to operate their far-flung possessions, an administrative machine made of interchangeable parts, each of which happened to be human. In order to turn out those parts, they needed another machine, an educational one, which would reliably produce people who could read quickly, write legibly, and do addition, subtraction and multiplication in their heads. As Mitra put it, ‘They must be
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