Few people remember Dr. Frank C. Laubach today. They do benefit from his legacy of teaching literacy.
Who Was Dr. Laubach?
Born in 1884 in Benton, Pennsylvania, the future Dr. Laubach was like most of the boys growing up in a small rural town. One difference was his love of reading. That carried him through a few years teaching before going on to Princeton. He was spiritual and interested in missionary work.
Dr. Laubach and his wife Effie began their lives as missionaries in 1915 in the Philippines. He planned on working among the Muslims on the southern islands, but there was too much turmoil.
The Philippines
Ferdinand Magellan claimed the islands for Spain in 1521. The Spanish had just driven the Moors out of Spain. When he found Muslims living in the Philippines, he called them “Moros”, and considered them enemies setting the stage for centuries of wars between the Spanish and the Muslims.
The United States took over the Philippines in 1898 as part of the settlement for the Spanish-American War. The Muslims didn’t think this was an improvement.
Teaching Literacy
After years of doing other work in the Phillippines, Dr. Laubach finally started work in Lanao in the south in 1929. He was an outsider and viewed with suspicion by the inhabitants.
In the evening Dr. Laubach would climb a hill to watch the sunset. It was there he realized he was the problem. He felt he was better than they were because he was white. So he began listening to the people.
Maranao was an unwritten language. A few hadjis and panditas, heads of the villages, could read Arabic. No one else was literate. Maranao became the first language Dr. Laubach developed an alphabet for and wrote dictionary and grammar books for.
The motto was “Each one, Teach one” as Dr. Laubach taught one person to read and write their own language and that person was to teach another in his village. This spread as he went on to develop books for other languages.
Laubach’s Legacy
At his death, Dr. Laubach had developed materials for teaching literacy to adults in 103 languages including English. These were simple enough for ordinary people to learn the material and teach illiterate adults or immigrants to read and write.
Illiteracy is a problem in the United States. Up to one in five people can not read well enough to fill out a job application. The government now offers classes to help these people to learn to read. But these aren’t enough and often aren’t stressed for new immigrants dooming them to day work or other exploitation by unscrupulous employers.
Teaching literacy was a problem in Jane Addams’ day, one she wrote about in “Twenty Years at Hull House” (review on Goodreads). Her solution, Dr. Laubach’s solution and one we should recognize and implement, is to teach and encourage literacy with the opportunity to learn and books people want to read.