Human culture, in the pedagogic imagination, is an immense pyramid. At its tip is the voice of reason, singular and resplendent. With its claim to universality, reason is indifferent to variations in the experience of those who speak in its name. Transcending experience, it speaks with in one voice and one alone, and all who speak with it are therefore interchangeable. At the base of the pyramid, swarms of assorted memes jostle for hosts into whose mouths they will put their proverbial utterances, and into whose hands they will place their prescribed designs. These hosts, too, lack any voice they can call their own. They are but vectors, fated to broadcast the memes with which they have been infected - and anyone infected with the same meme will say the same thing. They speak not for themselves but for culture. The world according to pedagogy in short, is a theatre of marionettes: above, reason, the master puppeteer, pulls the strings; below, a motley cast of characters, assembled from the elements of transmitted tradition, are compelled to dance to its tune. ‘Reason’, as philosopher Michel Serres wryly observes, ‘never discovers, beneath its feet, anything but its own rule’.