Education: Globalingo

The Navy's orders were to teach them seamanship in a hurry. But only about 100 of the 1,000 Chinese could speak English, and some 300 of the rest could not even write their native Chinese.

Within 18 weeks last summer at the U.S. Naval Training Center at Miami, the Chinese had passed a battery of formidable examinations in gunnery and naval techniques, were equipped to shout, or to heed, such salty orders as "right standard rudder," or "steady as you go!"

The man who did the trick is a mild, little, wild-haired British professor, I. A. (for Ivor Armstrong) Richards, the Western Hemisphere's...

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