This is not the first auspicious occasion in this column that we have had the rueing that education in Assam, and indeed in the rest of Northeast India, is in a state of disarray and that it needs serious rethink and repair. We have been pointing to the many malaises afflicting the education sector of this region many a time in this column only to be emboldened with perturbing facts and figures to point further to the deeper canker. And facts are facts – undisputable. Look at this school: the Doigrung Kenduguri Primary School under the Golaghat East Education Block in Assam, a State that once boasted of intellectual giants like KK Handiqui (the first VC of Gauhati University) and Anundoram Borooah (the ICS jewel from this region who eventually went on to become an intertiolly acclaimed authority on Sanskrit literature). The Doigrung school, as this newspaper reported on 3 December 2017, is an institution that was built with generous funds flowing in from Numaligarh Refinery Limited and has a strength of about 100 pupils from Nursery to Class V. But the mother of all wonders is that it has a lone classroom and a lone teacher who teaches all the students in the same classroom at the same time and who has also to look after affairs such as mid-day meal and official duties requiring him to visit the education office in the district headquarters! But yes, he, in fact, is not a loner; he is assisted by a volunteer from the village concerned! A one-teacher school, this is, where yet the hapless parents of the more hapless students are forced to radiate hopes dashing against the real world of institutiol apathy and callousness that works out the charade of a new-age education boom in the State and of the making of a knowledge society. This is not how education happens in the 21st century. And this is not the solitary case. The government’s own admission has a tale hanging: as per the first Gutsav phase report, there are as many as 1,368 single-teacher schools in the eight districts covered. The synopsis of the tale is that education is not just happening, that too at the primary level where education ought to be education in the real sense of the term – more than the homes where parents, mired in illiteracy, poverty and backwardness, repose faith in the school system so that their wards are empowered to be human resources in the future.