Once it was assumed that if children made mistakes in whatever anyone was trying to teach them, the appropriate response was to get out the stick, and that the sight or sound of a beating and the resulting cries of pain would motivate better learning. But ever since the humane and humanistic idea of sharing fun first emerged, the idea of teaching by terror has had no serious advocate.

Among the best known humanistic figures are Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1670), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), Johan Pestalozzi (1746-1827), Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), and Maria Montessori (1870-1952). All of them mainly focused on education.

But there is another humanist story going back before Komensky. Going beyond humanism. the focus shifts to children. Some of this thinking was about language. Roger Ascham was an all-round renaissance scholar. William Holder was an experimenter, mathematician, for a short time the first speech and language pathologist and a fore-runner of modern generative linguistics and biolinguistics. John Thelwall was the first to practise speech pathology as a career after retiring from politics. Alexander Melville Bell was a wide-ranging, all-round linguist and speech pathologist. Bridget Plowden was a gifted organiser and propadandist. Carol Chomsky was a gifted experimentalist in child language. Lada Iosifovna Aidarova was another gifted experimentalist focusing mainly on literacy. It seems that Lada Aidarova and Carol Chomsky, working on the same things at the same time at the height of the cold war, never knew of one another’s work. Holder, Thelwall and Bell developed ideas developed a legacy which was was subsequently lost and buried, but not before George Bernard Shaw satyrised the shenanigans in Pygmalion.

Roger Ascham (1514 – 1568)

When Elizabeth, the future queen, was 15 years old, her tutor suddenly died, and she selected as her next tutor Roger Ascham, then the Orator of Cambridge. Ascham had himself taught Elizabeth’s last tutor. Elizabeth’s choice was extraordinarily insightful and well-informed.

Ascham taught Elizabeth hand-writing, history, geography, mathematics, architecture, astronomy, Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and Flemish. Elizabeth was evidently an avid student. She and Ascham went on to become friends for life.

Ascham had the revolutionary idea of wanting to make the learning process fun and interesting. He wrote, “The Schoolhouse should be indeed, as it is called by name, the house of play and pleasure, and not of fear and bondage.” Mindful of the fate of Socrates and, more recently, Thomas More, he was aware of how his point could be turned against him. Attitudes to discipline in education could be a coded reference to politics. What Ascham was saying could be seen as only one step away from questioning the whole social order in a world in which torture and public execution were common-place events. So Ascham left to his widow the task of publishing his book The Scholemaster or Plaine and Perfite Way of Teachyng Children the Latin Tong.

Ascham’s skills as a teacher were evident in the accomplishments of Elizabeth, who became on her own merits a significant scholar. In 1593, at the age of 60, she translated into English the Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius, from about 524, long one of the most influential books in the world, setting out appropriate limits on power and privilege without any reference to religion. Boethius wrote this work in prison knowing, that he would be painfully and bloodily executed for a treason of which he was not guilty. This work, about 40,000 words long, had previously been translated into English by King Alfred and by Geoffrey Chaucer. Elizabeth made her translation in twelve two-hour sessions over three weeks – no mean feat at almost 1,700 words an hour.

William Holder (1616 – 1698)

 

The Reverend William Holder would seem to have been the first ever speech and language pathologist. In 1660, Holder was tutoring the 10 year old Alexander Popham who was deaf to the point that he had no speech at all. (It is hard to work out what sort of deafness this was, but it was evidently severe). The Pophams were a well-connected, upper class, political family, with the means to find and employ the best possible tutor for Alexander. Holder had previously been the tutor of the polymath, Christopher Wren, who was at least as much of a mathematician as he was an architect.

As a founder fellow of the Royal Society, in 1667 he gave what was seemingly an all day seminar to his fellow fellows on his treatement of Alexander. This was seemingly the first ever therapeutic or educational approach to deafness. The Royal Societyhasd just been founded by Charles ll. It quickly became the world center of advanced science. The fellows were gifted, well-informed intellectuals who met weekly in London to discuss matters of science and mathematics. Charles made sure that the proceedings were promptly reported back to him. He wanted to avoid the fate of his father. From Holder’s clear description, his treatment was based on a fore-runner version of what is now known as ‘generative phonology’, now a significant field in linguistics. In the 17th century the term, ‘linguistics’ had yet to come into use or existence. It is therefore, also important to notice that it was the clinical impulse which originally inspired the first inklings of generative reasoning.

Holder’s originality was to propose that ‘letters’, or speech sounds, or ‘phonemes’ as we would now say, should be viewed, not as such, but as the effect of particular combinations of hierarchically organised ‘matters’, defined by where the tongue is in the mouth, how the airflow is shaped, whether the airflow is allowed to pass through the nose, what is going on in the voice-box or larynx. This happens in what Holder calls the ‘tract of Speech’, what we now call the ‘vocal tract’, which Holder was the first to conceive as an anatomical entity. Holder’s matters are now known as ‘distinctive features‘. Crucially,  for Holder, phonemes were derived from the features, rather than the other way round. So the features were not accidental properties of phonemes, but definitional. Holder is most insistent about this order of definition. He shows this idea by a matrix with rows and columns, and calls this the ‘true Alphabet of Nature… out of which all languages are made’. He clearly conceived of the matrix as applying to all languages. What was language-specific was the pattern of ‘derivations’ or the pathway from the features to the pronunciation. He notes that “the French write some consonants which they do not pronounce to be Indices of the Derivations of their words.” Holder thus brought the mathematical notion of derivation to the study of speech. IThe theory and terminology is still in use, although Holder’s original contribution is largely unknown.

Holder’s hierarchy was a first step towards what in 1985 Nick Clements would call the ‘geometry of phonological features’. This would become the basis for much current thinking about the sound systems of human language, known as phonology, including the notion of ‘non-linearity’. By this idea, features are not in some randomly ordered stack, but they are organised in a hierarchical structure. The vowels are articulated with the tongue in particular configurations, as a function of their more general place in the mouth. Holder detected that these positions in the mouth are organised. This can easily be told by tapping the larynx while forming the mouth into the positons for the vowels in he, hay, har, hoar, who. One of what are now known as the ‘formants’ are organised in this simple linear series. Isaac Newton, another Royal Society fellow, was evidently in Holder’s audience. He later repeated Holder’s point about the organisation of the vowels as a series.

Applying to clinical practice this notion of hierarchically structured speech sounds, Holder would ask Alexander to repeat a series of minimally different forms which did not mean anything, but which were nevertheless possible words. “When you require one vowel of him, he will sometimes stumble on another… And when you have made him perfect at Syllables, then you may reckon that you have taught him all pronunciation of Language, since all words are onely some of these Syllables, or else Syllables compounded of these.”

Holder missed out what is now often referred to as the metricality of ‘word stress’ and the effects of different grammatical roles. These would be for later scholars from John Thelwall to Chomsky and Halle to discover.

 

Holder was the first to describe the sounds of speech in terms of ‘matters’ or ‘elements’, what are now known as ‘features‘, general and fundamental properties of the sounds, such as how and where they are articulated in the mouth and whether or not the airstream passes through the mouth. He used the term ‘derivation‘ in the modern sense to decribe a process of sound formation, with French and English differing in the derivation of final N sounds. Holder seems to have been the first person to conceive of the vocal tract as an entity extending from the lungs to the lips and including the nasal cavity.

Holder describes a therapy which consisted in getting the child to say imaginary two syllable word structures based on sequences of vowels and consonants. The structures are all possible English words, although Holder does not use this term.

Child-friendliness oozes from Holder’s pen. He stresses the importance of encouraging children by ‘sweetness’. He writes, “Their eyes are the more vigilant, attent and heedful, which… gives a delight and encouragement to those who teach such apprehensive scholars…. Of those who are deaf and dumb, I say they are Dumb by consequence from their Deafness.”

When Holder was moved to another parish, young Alexander’s education was suspended. and many of the gains which he had made with Holder were lost.

John Wallis (1616 – 1703)

In 1653, 16 years before Holder published his results with Alexander, John Wallis, known primarily as a mathematician and cryptographer, had published a Grammar of the English language, one of the first attempts to treat English as a language in its own right. It would seem to have been at least partly on the basis of this that when Alexander had been without a teacher for two years, Wallis was asked to take Holder’s place.

But unlike Holder, Wallis did not go beyond categorisation. His theory would not lead to any notion. of possible words.

In 1670, a year after Holder’s book came out, Wallis published an account of his own work with Alexander, implicitly rubbishing Holder. Holder replied. A dispute began. It rumbled on for years, mainly about honesty, recognition, and priority. Holder maintained that Wallis had visited him to see what he was doing with Alexander. Wallis denied this.

Wallis could not in any way be regarded as an advocate of child-centred or child-friendly education. There is no such thread in his work. It would seem that Wallis’s main concern was just to try and establish that he himself had learnt nothing from Holder.

John Thelwall (1764 – 1834)

In 1794, John Thelwall, then a leading campaigner for radical political reform and an original theorist of revolution, was put on trial for treason with two others. If they had been found guilty they would have faced execution by hanging, drawing and quartering. But although all three were found not guilty, Thelwall was continually hounded by the authorities. He eventually retired from revolutionary politics to be the first to work full time helping children with developmental problems with speech and language.

In his way of thinking and clinical practice, he folllowed Holder.

He was the first to realise that the rhythm or stress contours of English words is highly significant. In a very modern way he noted that these contours have both edges and peaks. Using the metaphor of musical ‘cadences’, Thelwall developed an early version of metrical theory to describe the characteristic English alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables, applying to all words in the language.

And he was the first to distinguish between speech disorders which were, to at least some degree, the effect of a child’s experiences good or bad, and those which were not.

Coincidentally, his clinic, in what he jokingly called ‘North Brixton Cottage’ (it’s now a block of fourteen flats), was only a short walk from my own clinic.

Alexander Melville Bell (1819 – 1905)

Alexander Melville Bell was an all round linguist. He was the first scholar to reflect upon the fact that in what are now known as ‘functors’, words like should and have, much of the sound structure can be lost. In “You should have told me that” the vowels in should and have are barely pronounced, with have prononced only as a schwa and a V. He thought about a machine that would replicate speech, a speech synthesiser. And he devised the first system for notating the sounds of speech which he called ‘Visible speech’, based on what was known at the time, based on Holder’s work and his own, of how the speech system or phonology worked.

Bell followed the tradition of Holder and Thelwall. He filled out a gap in Holder’s theory. Holder did not allow for the contribution of the lips by rounding to the vowels in who and haw. In a series of books starting in 1849 the showed hat English vowels could be defined, not just by the position of the tongue in the mouth, as Holder had proposed, but also by the rounding of the lips.

This lip-rounding relates to the way most English children say the L in words like little and middle, often saying little as LIKU and middle as MIGU. This seems to be conditioned by the difference in stress between the first and second syllables, and to the derivational effect of the fact that the underlying representation of the L sound is with the tongue tip. Next to the tongue tip L the T or D loses its tongue tip articulation, becoming a K and G, by what is known as ‘dissimilation’. (Here I am extending and developing a theory known as ‘Radical Underspecification’ from Diana Archangeli in 1984). Competently spoken  little varies quite widely from one variety of the language to another.

He encouraged his son, Alexander Graham, to think inventively and experimentally. So at the the age of eleven, having heard from his father of the idea of  vowels defined by the shape of the mouth cavity, Alexander Graham was allowed to put tongue depressors into the mouth of the family Scotch terrier.

Lady Bridget Plowden (1900 – 2000)

As a scion of the British establishment, the daughter of an admiral and historian of naval history, Bridget Plowden chaired the committee which in 1967 shifted the balance towards child-centredness in British primary education. She was given this job by a conservative minister for education. She organised a research program with teams going all over Europe, including Eastern Europe, to look at education. She gave her report to a labour minister in the next government. She noted that teachers thought in the same way no matter what system they were working in.  The Labour goverment of the time acted energetically on Plowden’s report. Clearly written by Plowden herself, the report stressed that “at the heart of the educational process lies the child”. Her key recommendations were:

• Contact with home;
• Positive discrimination for schools in deprived areas;
• Teaching English as a second language where necessary;
• Nursery education from three;
• No reliance on tests;
• No corporal punishment;
• Smaller class sizes;
• No more use of the term “educationally sub-normal”;
• More male teachers.

But the thinking here was only partially implemented. In 1969 the ‘Black Papers’ in education started to emerge, blaming all the problems in education on Plowden with minimal evidence.

Carol Chomsky (1930–2008)

Carol Chomsky pioneered the study of children’s syntax when they are sorting out some of the more subtle details. like the understanding of pronouns and the way ask, tell and promise work. In 1969 she showed that these things develop gradually and in ways that may not be obvious to attentive teachers. She conjectured that some individuals never get to correctly understand structures like “Ask her what to feed the cat”, taking this to reflect a question about what somebody else should be doing the feeding.

In the 1970’s Carol Chomsky argued that writing is an important and invaluable way of learning about reading.

Lada Iosifovna Aidarova (1936 – 2006)

Lada Iosifovna Aidarova, who spent her whole working life in the Research Institute of General and Educational Psychology in Moscow, was a innovative researcher in the education of young children. Following in the footsteps of Lev Vygotsky, Daniel Elkonin, and Vasily Davydov, Aidarova developed a new way of deepening children’s understanding of literacy, helping them to discover the fundamentals of linguistics, but in child-friendly ways. She set this out in five books. One was translated into English in 1982 as Child Development and Education. It is profusely illustrated with colour illustrations of the children’s work.

With children, she saw herself as a leader of their own independent research, rather than as a teacher. One child chose to call her own research project report “I am starting to investigate language”. The title reflects Aidarova’s vision.

Aidarova’s experiments were carried out, partly in the then highly-regarded Moscow School 91, and partly elsewhere, seemingly in the Ukraine. Moscow School 91 had long been a centre of educational research. Many ex-students went on to excel in various fields, including the poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the novelist, Boris Pasternak, and, more recently, Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris.

Aidarova set tasks that led children to make and present their own discoveries about language on the basis that (adapting her thinking to the case of English):

• The process of learning has multiple layers;
• Words are built out of parts, consonants, vowels, syllables, and other parts which pattern in similar, but not always exactly the same, ways in different words – like the different instances of S in English CATS and DOGS;
• Words which sound the same can mean different things – as in the English “I read a book last week” and “I just found the Little Red Book”;
• Words have histories changing over time. What is now called a radio or a tuner was once called a wireless;
• Communication proceeds by choosing ways of saying things, as waiting or lurking, as talking or wittering, as walking or ambling, or by calling someone a woman or a female, as a girl or a chick or a dame;
• Communication  can be a way of trying to influence people;
• Messages can be understood in different ways, as being polite, or insulting, or false;
• There are ways of gauging the success of attempts to communicate;
• Communication can be in different languages, and can be modeled in a general way, holding across an enormous variety of cases;
• How science proceeds by defining a topic of research, separating the known from the unknown, collecting data and checking, evaluating and analysing it.

So there are sensible questions about:

• Why is there not one language? How and why is it that there are different languages?
• Why does language change?
• How did words first come to be spoken?
• How do children learn to talk?
• Why is it, in English for example, that a good book and something good have meaning, but a book good and good something do not?
• How are speech and language connected with music, gesture, dance, drawing and art? Or are these things not connected?

Big questions for children in primary school. They all apply as much in Russian as in English. Aidarova gave children ideas about ways of expressing such thoughts using familiar symbols, including squares, triangles, circles, straight and jagged arrows, in different colours.  She notes that her book is partly written by the children. But this is not writer’s hype. Her methodology, by experiments in class, followed up by case studies, involved children taking ideas forward on their own and in their own ways. Two parallel classes, each with an average of 35 students, would be studied for a year. During the next school year the experimenter either continued with the same group of students, or (if the results were not satisfactory) the intervention was modified and repeated with new classes. The 10 year timescale and thoroughness of the experimentation were quite unlike what researchers are used to in the West.

What Aidarova may not have known about was how parents reacted. The children were studying things not generally taught in school, not in the USSR, not in the post-Soviet world since 1990, and not in the West other than in the few primary schools which have adopted Aidarova’s thinking. But in at least one Ukrainian primary school, Aidarova’s approach was followed into the 21st century. The parents of someone who was at this school, a scientist and a TV technician, told her as she got older how they would get together for dinner with other parents of children in the same class to discuss what their children were doing. These discussions apparently continued late into the night.

Aidarova’s research, continued in the work of her former student, Galina Zuckerman, is little known in the West. My thanks to Galina Zuckerman for the picture here and a helpful comment about this entry.

Aidarova’s daughter, Ksenia, continues her work.

A tradition going back to 1548

When Ascham started tutoring the young Elizabeth in 1548, he brought with him the then novel idea of fun in education. He helped to bury the idea of teaching by terror. 475 years later, in 1983 corporal punishment was finally banned in British schools, becoming a criminal offence 10 years later. But it was Ascham who pioneered the idea of sharing fun in school. This idea lived on in the thinking of teachers, researchers and other scholars, until the present with no countervailing argument of any serious substance. It gradually turned into the idea of a child-centred approach, enjoying jokes, and taking cues from children.

Ascham, Holder, Thelwall and Bell describe their practice in recognisably-modern terms, as does Aidarova.

Holder, Thelwall, Bell, and Aidarova laid the foundations for a modern clinical linguistics. Holder, Thelwall, and Bell all believed, as I do, that pseudo-words could be therapeutic. None of them actually used the expression ‘possible words’, as it only came into use from the 1968 work of Chomsky and Halle. But it is only on the basis of this idea that Holder, Thelwall, and Bell practice actually makes sense. By the way they were presented, the pseudo words words revealed the connections between their structures and thus the ‘shape’ of English as a language.

It is not known what Alexander Popham thought about a public argument between his two former teachers about who had academic priority for what and whether Wallis had visited Holder to see what he was doing with Alexander, as Holder alleged. (It would hardly be surprising if Wallis did visit Holder. Holder was the first person in the world to be doing what he was doing. As he showed in his Royal Society seminar in 1667, he was happy to share his results with anyone interested.) But the most interesting of their differences was their order of explanation. In his Grammar of English, Walllis had presented an essentially taxonomic list of the phonemes. Holder argued for the much less obvious ordering – from the ‘matters’ or ‘features’ in modern parlance to the phonemes. In this way Holder foreshadows what is now known as ‘generative phonology’, as by Chomsky and Halle’s  Sound Pattern of English 300 years later.

This dispute between generative and taxonomic approaches is far from settled. The work of Holder, Thelwall and Bell has been taken a great deal further by modern linguistics, with the key initiative by Chomsky and Halle. Updating and completing what Holder called the ‘true alphabet of nature’, Chomsky and Halle applied the same mathematical approach to develop the theory of ‘distinctive features’ defining the phonemes of human language.

John Thelwall described some of the stress patterns of English. Alexander Melville Bell clearly suspected that the patterns were accountable. Chomsky and Halle provided the first full account.

The contributions of Ascham, Holder, and Thelwall were discovered by Judith Duchan. The work of Bell was lost by some academic shenanigans in the early 1900s, but recovered by Morris Halle in 1978.