Books: Reading & The World

Fortnight ago about 2,000 teachers from Midwest schools and colleges met in Chicago for their third annual Conference on Reading. A number of first-rate thinkers have been worrying about the subject for a good 15 years. On hand at the Chicago conference was one of the keenest of them: Ivor Armstrong Richards, Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, collaborator with C. K. Ogden on the famed Meaning of Meaning (1923), author of numerous works that broke ground for such books as Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read A Book (TIME, March 18).

Ivor Richards’ first public appearance in the U. S. was in 1931 at Harvard, where he arrived straight from two years’ teaching at Tsing Hua University, Peking. His rumpled clothes, backswept curls, glinting, slightly Oriental eyes and catching humor interested undergraduates, but what interested them more was his exploratory teaching. A trained psychologist, Richards had discovered not only that the same piece of writing rarely got the same response from any two readers, but that astounding misinterpretations were quite common. His practical exercises in reading English literature correctly were as fresh to Harvard—and as popular—as they had been in England.

During the next eight years this world-traveling don busied himself mainly with a movement regarded by its enthusiasts as one of the hopes of world order: the propagation of the international language called Basic English (TIME, March 12, 1934, et seq.). A simplified English devised by C. K. Ogden, containing only 850 words but capable of expressing practically any idea, “Basic” made great headway in the middle ’30s. Not only did students in many countries find it easy to learn and use, but English and U. S. writers discovered that translating their thoughts into Basic never failed to clarify them. Basic schools were established from Prague to Peking and Saigon.

Last autumn, when it appeared that Europe was beyond Basic for the moment, Ivor Richards shifted his field. With a Rockefeller Foundation grant of $10,000 a year for five years, he returned to Harvard, brought together several of his most brilliant followers, including a winsome, 24-year-old Chinese girl named T’an Pin Pin. One of the first things theydid was to arrange with station WRUL, Boston, for daily, half-hourbroadcasts in Basic English on short wave for Latin America. Thesebroadcasts (news reports, features, a dailylesson in Basic) have gone on all winter in charge of T’an Pin Pin. This month T’an Pin Pin is returning to China to get married, and the broadcasts have been reduced to one a week.

For next autumn, however, Ivor Richards plans an extended program. He and his colleagues have completed a primary text of Basic English for Spanish-speaking peoples which will be published by Houghton Mifflin. They have also completed a first-year primer with a Portuguese text for Brazil. Two of them, Mr. & Mrs. Robert Tucker, left last month for Quito, Ecuador, to establish there a Basic English School and to study the results of next autumn’s broadcasts. This school will have a competitor, for there is already a well-subsidized German school in Quito.

This fact makes plain the significance of what Richards & Co. are trying to do. In Chicago last fortnight Ivor Richards made it still plainer. Said he: “Unless Hitler is beaten the English language will be out in 100 years except in certain parts of the U. S.” He said he thought all U. S. radio stations should run daily lessons in Basic English for thebenefit of South American listeners.

Said Ivor Richards to the Conference on Reading: “Democracy depends on free and self-reliant interpretation [of what is read]. We may either train our successors by the methods appropriate in teaching tricks to dogs—deprivation, exclusion of alternatives and thought-provoking explanations, quick reward and sharp punishment, and drill—I sometimes wonder how much Goebbels learned from Pavlov*— or we may educate them to be free citizens. . . . The first way is much easier. You kill off those who won’t learn, as we have seen in Poland and Czecho-Slovakia and will soon be seeing in France. The other way is harder and it takes the whole human being in an endeavor which is humanity growing more human. At the moment, whether it can continue at all anywhere in our century depends on something I can scarcely speak about here, the willingness of the men and women of England to keep on dying for it.”

*Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, famed Russian scientist, experimented on dogs to ascertain the rules of “conditioned reflexes.”