Category: Language and education

Thinking about Schools and Reading

Adele Fasick1 Comment

Now that schools are back in session, school boards across the country are worrying about what children should be reading and what they should not read. Somehow, we have lost track of the most important goal–children’s ability to read.

Today I am going to repeat a blog I wrote about Maria Montessori, a woman who influenced early education throughout much the world. She taught us that children should be READING–happily and effectively.

Born in 1870 in Chiaravalle, Italy, Montessori entered a technical school as a teenager, intending to become an engineer. After graduating from that program, she decided that she would prefer to be a physician and entered medical school in Rome. Both of these careers were unlikely choices for a woman in Italy at that time, but Montessori never seemed to consider the more usual female path of giving up her career to become a wife and mother.

Medical school was difficult for her because she was a woman and was therefore not allowed to view a naked body in the same room as male students. She had to do her studies in the laboratory by herself after other students had left. During medical school, Montessori specialized in the treatment of children with physical and mental disabilities that made it difficult for them to benefit from conventional education. After she completed her degree, she continued to work with these children and to study treatments available.

Maria Montessori’s only child, a son, was born two years after she graduated from medical school. If she and her partner had married, she would have had to resign from her professional work, so the two of them agreed to remain unmarried but to be faithful to each other. Unfortunately, her partner was pressured into marriage by his family, so Montessori was left with the full responsibility of raising their son. She was forced to allow the child to be raised by other people and was not in contact with him until he became an adolescent. In later life he worked with her in setting up her schools and promoting her educational ideas.

As Montessori studied children and how they learned, she came to realize that methods devised to teach children with mental disabilities would be beneficial to all children. She devised teaching materials and set up learning environments so that children could work on their own and learn from one another. Montessori also continued lecturing and writing and her work became well-known in Europe and beyond. Many of her suggestions are couched as “rules” for adults working with children:

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

The greatest sign of success for a teacher… is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.

Although not many children across the world attend Montessori schools, the ideas and practices that Maria Montessori pioneered have affected education for many of us.

Being able to read–effectively and easily is our most important goal. Let’s stop qibbling about words and phrases and concentrate on the importance of joy in reading.

An unknown Kingdom—The most fascinating book I read in 2022

Adele Fasick3 Comments

Most nonfiction books add ideas and facts to knowledge the reader already has, but it is rare to read a book that opens up a whole new world. This year when I read “Kingdom of Characters” by Jing Tsu, I was introduced to an entire sphere of knowledge I knew almost nothing about. Even though I had studied American and European history in school and have read biographies for many years, I had almost always seen China through the eyes of Western visitors and writers. Tsu gave me an inside view of some of the ways the country has changed over the past hundred years or so and how it has become part of a worldwide culture. And she does this by telling us the ways in which reading and writing have adapted to the modern global world. It started with the alphabet.

To write their language, Chinese speakers have traditionally used ideograms, in which each word is represented by a tiny picture that represented an individual word. Most other languages used an alphabet in which a small number of symbols could be combined in various ways to represent many different words. This made a tremendous difference in the way Chinese people could communicate in writing.

It took years of patient work for scholars to construct a Mandarin alphabet that was finally presented in 1904. Instead of praise, the scholar who achieved this, Wang Zhao, was imprisoned for attempting to modernize the country. But he had taken the first step that would lead the country into the modern world culture.

Jing Tsu takes us through the skills that were needed to allow Chinese speakers to communicate easily with people who spoke and wrote other languages. One step was developing a way to arrange words in an index. We often forget that it is knowledge of the alphabet that allows us to know immediately where to find the word we are looking for. People who grow up using an alphabetic language, learn the alphabet while they are very young. This gives them a basic tool to organize knowledge. In a list of vegetables, for example, a turnip is always going to come after an onion. We don’t even have to think about it. But in a language without an alphabet, a new way of organizing entries had to be worked out.

With every step toward joining the world community, another adaptation had to be mastered. The Chinese language could not be used on a Western typewriter. Those were designed for languages based on an alphabet rather than a language based on characters, as Chinese was, so a new kind of typewriter had to be invented.

With each new development—the typewriter, the card catalog, the teletype and then the computer—new adjustments had to be made so that the Chinese language could be used on the tools developed throughout the world. Jing Tsu makes the struggle to enter the global world of writing almost as exciting as a tiger hunt. Today China holds its place in the international marketplace and the scientific community on an equal footing with other countries using other languages.

You can find Jing Tsu’s book, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (2022) in most public libraries both in hardcover and in Kindle editions. A paperback edition will be published in January 2023.