Frank Charles Laubach was back at his Benton, Pa. birthplace for a few days last week, trying every single minute to think of God.
He always tries, even when worrying about the Sisyphean task of teaching the illiterate three-fifths of humanity (some 1,200,000,000) how to read. Since 1930 lean, leathery Frank Laubach, a Congregationalist missionary, has made considerable headway with that enormous task. He and unnumbered thousands of other people, using his special teaching charts, have armed unknown and unknowable scores of thousands of Asiatics, Africans and Latin Americans with the double-edged tool of literacy.
Frank Laubach has set up his charts for no less than 79 tongues, has recently been working on his 80th — Korean. Orthodox teachers have orthodox reservations about Laubach's teaching methods, but none whatever about the great success of his life work. Laubach himself gives full credit to God for sending him on a job at which he has "more fun than anybody else in the world." But he warns that reading, itself, is not enough—there must be the right kind of reading. "Democracy, Protestantism, and literacy are triplets."
When the Japs bombed the Philippines, Laubach was visiting the U.S. after 25 years of missionary and literacy work on the Philippine island of Mindanao, in India, Africa, the Near East. He armed himself with a letter from Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, took on the 90,000,000 illiterates of Latin America, from October 1942 to May 1943 barnstormed over 20,000 miles of that area.
Mama Means Man. Laubach believes in teaching individuals, or very small groups (adults hate to look foolish), and starts with syllables, not words -(most languages, unlike English, are phonetic, lend themselves to syllabic teaching). Once an adult learns symbols for syllables, he is well on his way to reading. Laubach began teaching their dialect (Maranaw) to the Moslem Moros of Mindanao by joshing them into memorizing the appearance of ma, then pointing to the chart where mama occurs. When the Moro says mama, he has read the Maranaw for man. After as little as half an hour, a bright Moro can stumble through a page. After an average of a dozen lessons any normal adult illiterate begins to read fluently.
Laubach decided to be a missionary while at Princeton ('09), picked on Mindanao while at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. He married a fellow townswoman, reached the Philippines in 1915. Effa Seely Laubach kept house and the books. They lost two sons due to lack Of hospital facilities. But a quarter century of hardship and effort has only increased Laubach's confidence in his call. In The Silent Billion Speak, latest of his numerous rapturous books, he writes that "if we can untangle Christ from the terrible handicap of Christendom, which has kept so many millions from Him, we will be doing ... a priceless service."