A university professor and director of a writing program found many examples of what he terms "colonialism" during his thirty years of teaching experiences in countries around the world. One such example was a former pupil in Hong Kong struggling to make her students memorize a poem called "London Snow" ("snow" is an abstract concept in Hong Kong) so that they could win a contest to be judged by the British, homesick for snowy England. In Georgia, the professor was asked to revise student compositions in ungrammatical but forceful black English for a school newspaper while the students played for three weeks. Impressing the administration was a necessity, rather than teaching the students how to revise for themselves. In London, poor inner city students insisted on the superior qualities of the Rolls Royce or Jaguar over the Cadillac, even though they rarely got to ride in cars of any kind--their patriotism served so easily to divert them from more important lessons. The final irony occurred in rural China where the Chinese and Americans have a joint venture in a new hotel. The Chinese government hired the persons who spoke the best English, not those who were the best qualified as cooks, servers, or problem solvers. Based on these experiences, the professor has come to equate the idea of literacy not with a set of skills to be learned but rather with a certain behavior to be achieved: passive obedience to authority. (NKA)