Literacy Matters

I really love getting comments on my blog posts, and generally my policy is to publish all non-spam comments. I got one today that I am not publishing, though, and the reasons for that kind of fit into something that I have been thinking about, so it all works well.

The post comment was on my “Donald Trump is a Big Fat Idiot” post, and it said something to the effect that I spent all these words saying that he was right, and then I say that the it will not really be used by members of Congress because they already have health care and this will affect the uncovered more, but millionaires will be forced to join, and my post is shameful propaganda, or something like that. It was not as coherent as it could have been, which was a big part of my decision not to publish.

I mean, obviously I disagreed, but normally I will still publish the comment and then I will write a response. With a recent post I would probably still have done that, but that was from July 2nd. The biggest issue, though, was that the demonstrated lack of reading comprehension made me feel that my efforts to clarify would be wasted. There are ways in which the Affordable Care Act affects everyone, including members of Congress and millionaires, but not the way a lot of people think, and there could be some room for explanation there. If you can read that post and think I am saying that the quote is correct, any further explanation is clearly useless.

There are a lot of stupid ideas out there, with many sad reasons, but I have been thinking about how important language is in the processing of information. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said that “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” That probably is true, but there is more to that. I’m just going to tell a bunch of stories here.

One thing I remember from my class at the Missionary Training Center is that we had one elder who was native Lao. He was very immature, and did not seem too bright (I know, not uncommon with 19-year old boys, but even for that), but as we progressed in our study of Laotian, he really seemed to become smarter. Once in the mission field, you spend a certain amount of hours doing community service, and one thing we did for a while was tutoring a little Lao girl in Laotian. That school found that when you give ESL students instruction in their native language, they do better across the boards.

What it taught me is that when you don’t get firmly grounded in one language, it is hard to get grounded in anything. I saw this with other Lao teenagers. Often then would speak in English to their parents, and be answered in Lao, and it worked for basic family communication, but there were a lot of things that were hard for them to express, especially with emotional or spiritual issues.

The other thing that reinforced that is something that President Houck said. They had a son who was deaf, and President Houck never really had any major callings while this son was growing up. He felt like he could do more, and he wondered why he wasn’t asked, but it came to him that right now the important thing was signing to his son so this his son understood everything that was going on.

I had read an article around that time about a deaf girl who had missed out on lots of things in church, so that it was a surprise to her when she was in high school to learn that she would see her dead grandfather again. His service kept his son better-informed and progressing, and later on he ended up being one of the missionaries who opened up the British Sign Language mission. President Houck obviously became a mission president, and had been a stake president before that, and I’m sure has served in lots of ways, but at that time the most important service he could give was to  his son.

So many people, especially as budget issues become worse, talk about focusing education so that it basically prepares people for the workforce, but there is a lot to be said for preparing people for life. That involves the study of language, and rhetoric, and civics and art and all sorts of other things, but I am focusing on the language because that’s kind of my thing, and it is also the building block to everything else. Even just the ability to understand your emotions, we do that through language.

That brings me to my last story. My senior year in college there was a guy in my seminar who could not form coherent thoughts about the material, or lots of things, actually. You could see that he felt he understood the information, and he probably did feel some clicks of understanding as he read, but then when he needed to talk about it the words would not come. He ended up dropping out of school.

I had recommended he try journal writing, just to build up habits of finding words and building thoughts, and I hope he took that, or something else worked out, because it wasn’t that he was dumb. He just couldn’t express himself. And that is a tragedy.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/07/normal-0-donald-trump-is-big-fat-idiot.html