The Tyranny of Words

The Tyranny of Words "Violence begins where discussions ends. When people have no more ways of expressing themselves, they use violence. " These words by French writer and lecturer Marek Halter appeared recently in the Washington Post. He was speaking of the Persian Gulf War and the motives of Saddam Hussein but the words struck me as the most compelling call to eradicate illiteracy that I had yet come across. Young people with no other effective way of communicating turn to violence with tragic results for all of us. Literacy, the basic ability to read and write, is neither a panacea for violence and the rest of society's ills nor a solution for every student. Rather it is a reference or starting point. As our democratic society becomes more accepting of its own plurality, methods of communication that are clear and acceptable to all must be found and once found nurtured. Such methods may well go beyond reading and writing but they will not outpace the basic component of human intercourse--that every individual needs and deserves a valid means of communication. Literacy still predominates in that category and therefore cannot be undervalued. History supports such a view: Two hundred years ago Thomas Jefferson wrote frequently of the need for his new nation to "[e]ducate and inform the whole mass of people. " Canada too demonstrates a belief in education and pluralism through the Provincial mandates for literacy. Wherever it exists, a stable society is built upon a citizenry that can address its problems and seek common solutions. Stability erodes when too many citizens cannot read and write and therefore not enter the mainstream of that society. Effective communication takes many forms and begins early. The right to a "free, appropriate education" guaranteed by P.L. 94-142 certainly includes the right to communicate to the best of one's ability. For some that means an adapted keyboard or a headstick, to others a TDD or Braille decoder, and to many it means the ability to read and write. The special education student's need to be part of the literate majority is no less and perhaps even greater than that of his or her nondisabled peers. In the 1950s, I spent several years with the then Charlotte City Schools of North Carolina teaching junior-high-level students who were educable mentally retarded. A favorite part of my day was show and tell where, simple rules and time-tested format notwithstanding, we, students and teacher, learned a lot about each other. The students discovered what it felt like, if only briefly, to be in charge: what was necessary to get and maintain the class's attention, what it felt like to address a group of peers, and what brought that most sought-after commodity--approval. Robert Fulghum describes show and tell from the child's point of view as "education that came out of my life experience. You could do your thing without getting red-penciled or gonged to your seat" (It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It). To me it was also a teacher's learning time. Insights into the students, their environment, and the values they were developing came directly from their hands as they held aloft their chosen objects and from their words as they described those objects. In fact, show and tell can be summed up in one primary primal concept: child-centered communication. …