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.