Beyond the ABC
I tried to raise an issue last week in the chat room but unfortunately the server was not cooperating. The concept of “literacy” has been associated in the western world with the ability to read and write the alphabet and to decipher written words and numbers on paper.
One must attempt to analyze how a child in Afghanistan or Iran can weave a carpet for six to eight month and produce a work of art utilizing higher order thinking skills in math and science. The mathematics required to produce such carpets is considered by many equivalent to the calculus equations that high school students in the United States dread and avoid. The geometrical shapes, frequencies, matrices, matching colors and color combinations requires skills in science and math that would make a computer programmer stutter.
On the other hand, a reader of the Arabic poetry will be surprised to discover that thousands of poems written by hundreds of poets were transferred from a generation down to the next generation by rote memory rather than bound paper. The Arabs for thousands of years memorized poems made of hundreds of lines without having to write them down. The poems had to rhyme and end by the same letter and no word can be used twice even in two thousand lines poems. It was considered a weakness to write poem indicating a poor memory and a lack of intelligence to memorize complex grammatical structures.
It was not till the prophet Mohammad ordered that the Quran be written to avoid changes and misinterpretations that any Arabic was written at all. Hence the Arabs consider the Quran a blessing as it encouraged people to write down their literature and preserve their history. The writing was on camel hides and palm tree leaves till paper was introduced and books were collected and bound.
On a personal level, I am the second generation in the family who had the chance to learn how to read and write in three languages, Arabic, English and Japanese. My grandfather and his brothers memorized hundreds of poems, the WHOLE of the holy Quran which is over a thousand pages and more than fifty different chapters. However, my grandfather needed my help to fill out his tax form at the end of the year or to read his phone and electric bill at the end of the month. I, like many people who admired the Western standards of literacy used to look down at my grandfather because he did not know how to read and write till I learned Japanese, computer applications and saw my son learn how to play and master five musical instruments. It became easy to comprehend how people communicate when my daughter came home for the holidays conversing fluently in Spanish, Latin and Japanese, like the Arabic that I taught her and she said that it is so much easier to understand the world around her now.
It finally occurred to me that the language is nothing but a group of symbols needed to exchange ideas with others, ask for things that you need and to execute the economic transactions that we do every day. The Japanese use Chinese characters which is like pictures and they combine these characters to make words and sounds, absence the presence of tenses and genders.
Isn’t mathematics just a language put into symbols to facilitate writing. We can use math to write a two pages economic transaction in two lines of formulae. Isn’t music a group of symbols to express feelings, emotions and to express words and sounds yet another group of symbols.
I used to also think that the alphabet was important till I saw the movie “ Space Odessy 2001” which came out in 1968 where a robot spoke in human language ( English) and expressed itself to Dave, the man character in the movie. It made wonder then why we consider the alphabet the standard for evaluating the success of the learning process undergone by a child or an individual. Many a students I have taught in the last five years can program a computer, build a web=page, complete a database or build a spread sheet faster than many adults can read one page of a newspaper. These same students can not write one whole paragraph or read one page in a book because their elementary school language arts teacher failed to motivate them. The production of audio computers will facilitate their learning and expression so the alphabet is not important anymore and they will succeed and make money more than all of the readers of this message and Bill Gates will testify to this. Bill Gates father had to bribe him to complete his homework so he can graduate from high school.
Ask a deaf person how many times sign language saved his/her life or helped them order a meal or express love and appreciation. Better yet, ask yourself how many times you felt like getting out of the car and chasing that S.O.B because he/she gave you that old sign with the middle finger and without uttering a single word.
