READING OPENS UP A WHOLE NEW WORLD

THE other day, Franklyn Jacobs, Herman Gribble and Roger Fester visited me, bringing some goodies and some beautiful memories. I taught them exactly 50 years ago at Heatherdale. They brought tears to my eyes: to think that they could take out time to spend a few hours with an old warhorse of a teacher such as I. Thank you, gentlemen.

This week, I shall re-tell a famous children’s tale called The Little Red Hen. Remember, a language is a subject, something you study the way you would study weather or clothes design. You have to know the workings of the beast and not make it your identity, your nationality, your clobber weapon, your frenzied hegemonic war cry for your prejudices or the last bastion of defence for your short-sighted pig-headedness.

Literacy, like music and dance, crosses, acknowledges and ignores all borders. A language is merely a tool of communication. As such, it has parts of speech, levels of intensity, non-negotiable truths about bi-labial plosives, glottal stops and fricatives; metaphors, anapaest, antonyms, hyperbole, split infinitives, suspended participles and tenses like the future-in-the-past. You will have noticed how the rigour intensifies the longer I keep on about the parts. But it should be like that because when you study the piano, you don’t leave out the difficult notes. You learn to play them all.

Language should be the strongest cohesive factor in any society. Knowledge is embedded in the domain-specific area of language. Children, throughout their twelve years of schooling and later, university, make subject choices. The selections are varied, but they all have to do it through the medium of language. It doesn’t matter if it’s Urdu, French, Kiswahili, Afrikaans, or whatever. Every person must have a language.

I am aiming at the three-year-old and climb as the discussion and strategies develop and burgeon. The story is of Russian origin, by the author with the greatest list of works ever, called Anonymous. It appeared in a collection for children in America, brought out in St Nicholas magazine in 1874. Its didactic thrust was to promote industry and personal initiative in children, much as the previous story I touted about Rip Van Winkle.

The little red hen found some kernels of wheat. ‘I shall take it home and plant it’, she said to her fluffy yellow chicks. As she walked by the farm fence, she asked: ‘Who will help me plant the wheat?’ ‘Not I,’ said the cow. ‘Not I’, said the cat. ‘Not I’, said the dog. ‘Not I’, said the duck. ‘Then I shall do it by myself’.

The story typically unfolds with questions about who will harvest, grind and turn the flour into dough. Every time, without fail, she got a ‘Not I’ for the various processes. Eventually, she bakes a fine oven loaf and asks rather smugly: ‘Who will help me eat this lovely bread?’. ‘I’, said the cow. ‘I’, said the cat and so forth.

Then she exacts her terrible revenge. ‘Oh, no. You did not help me at all. My chicks and I will eat up the whole bread by ourselves.’

Is this a story about the hen as an entrepreneur? Can animals talk (anthropomorphism)? Is the hen a poor negotiator for labour practice? Does she teach her children anything other than her terrible need to get even? Can what she does be seen as typical of a society, a nation, or a universe? Indeed, are there any questions that cannot be asked by the reading of this story? Find more questions in the story of Snow White, who employs little people to dig coal in mines. What about the golden-haired girl who walks into a house and samples other people’s breakfast without so much as a ’By your leave?’ And is there always a poisoned apple and a nasty lady with a lethal needle?

The point I am labouring to make is that there is a new world for you and your children to discover if you develop the habit of reading together. The holidays await. Go to.