Frank Laubach - The Apostle to the Illiterates

In doing a few more interviews for the book, I came across a very interesting story. It's only tangential to the main narrative, but interesting nonetheless.

Frank Laubach was a gentlemen from Pennsylvania who had gone to the Philippines in 1915 after study at Princeton. In 1929 he moved in with a tribe of Islamic aborigines who had just finished a 300 year guerrilla war with the Spanish, followed by 14 years of war with the Americans. These were the Muranao or "Moro" Tribesman.

The Moro armed, as often as not, only with knives, were sufficiently scary that the US military chose at that point to switch to the more powerful .45 caliber revolver.*

Anyway, on to the story itself.

Laubach is said, by his English-speaking biographers, to have come up with a system of language instruction called "Each One Teach One". He then went on to refine it, and use it to bring literacy to over 60 million people. A truly accomplished individual. The only missionary ever to be placed on a US stamp (the 30 cent in 1984).

However there's one place where the oral history, and the written history seem to diverge.

According to the story as told me by one of my story sources, what really happened is this.

Laubach went into the Moro village.

They were really not in a very good mood.

They had it up to HERE with the Provincial Government sending folks into their villages to try and ram English down their throats.

It went something like this:

Chief: "You"...."Yeah you "Laubach"".

"You are going to collect all of our words, and for each word you are going to make a drawing. When you have all of our important words, and the drawings that go with them, you will take your letters and you will use them to write down words that will work for us. You are then going to teach one of us to read those words. That one will teach two, and those two will teach more, and so on. And that way we will learn to read."

"You are going to do this."

"Do you know how I know that you are going to do this?"

"Because if you don't, I will kill you."

"Now get started."

And so he did.

* note: I've read that anecdote in several places but I haven't been able to find just what they switched from. All I'm finding is references to .45 caliber revolvers from Colt going back to 1873. That being the case, until I can find that piece of information, I recommend taking that statement with a grain of salt.

Hyperbole thy name is the History Channel

You just can't make this stuff up.

I just watched a few minutes of a History Channel show on Ben Franklin. They did a pretty good job of the first part, his pre-revolutionary days. Amazing stuff, and arguably his contributions to science/engineering (which were pretty closely tied together in those days), home heating, postal delivery, music....It's really breath-taking all the areas that he was active in, really do live up to the importance attributed to it by the shows writers.

But then they do the lead-in for the next phase of his career; the Revolution.

Why, they way they told it there was really no need for those other bumpkins; Washington, Paine, Revere, Jones, Adams, Jefferson, Swift, Smith*, to be involved in the American Revolution. Ben took care of everything. They could have stayed home.

I like the History Channel but I'd like to see them adopt more of a "keep it real" policy.

*I count Adam Smith in this group as, while not generally associated with the American Revolution, he was an active part of a flourishing intellectual movement; the Scottish Enlightenment, much of which was well known by the founders. When his book, The Wealth of Nations (OK, OK, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations") came out in 1776 much of the economic basics of that book were well known and informed the thinking of at least some of the founders. Heck, he'd been teaching for years so there were probably several hundred of his students scattered around the British empire, and they may well have a connection to one or more of the founders.

Update on the book

Well, the book proceeds apace. I have a usable basic framework of around 10,000 words. With that I think I have something like a "narrative arc" that will come together as a coherent whole. I have to flesh it out with some background, settings, and a few side trips that will probably fall out of the outstanding balance of the interviews that I have yet to conduct

One thing that I've noticed about my approach to date; I'm missing about half of the story. I've been heading down the path of focusing too much on the bad things that happened, and not the good things that were supposed to happen. I need one good story that coincides with the bad one and I think I'll have some symmetry and balance.