If you intend to sample as many of life’s adventures as you can and still have time to change the world – at least a little – then you’re going to have to live to be at least 102.
Margaret Byrd Rawson (1899 – 2001) from the United States began her career as a teacher and librarian in Philadelphia in the 1930s and went on to found schools and international organisations. She wrote nine books and took up flying at the age of 70. Even in her 90s she could be found energetically canoeing on lakes in Canada, or offering her expertise at public hearings on the teaching of reading.
It is for the way in which Rawson helped change perceptions of dyslexia that she will be best remembered. In 1935, when a bright boy in her class was unable to master the skill of reading by the second grade, Rawson refused to accept the conventional wisdom of the time – that the child was stupid. She enlisted the help of Samuel T Orton (1879 – 1948) who had developed teaching strategies to help learners suffering from a reading difficulty he called ‘Strephosymbolia” (literally, ‘twisted symbols”).
Rawson was convinced that the reason for the reading difficulty was neither a lack of intelligence nor an illness that a medicine could cure. She believed dyslexia to be a neurologically-based language disorder, sometimes genetically inherited, that can be described as a ‘word blindness”: the dyslexic reader struggles to make sense of written symbols.
Because of Rawson’s premise that the child is intellectually able, she put the onus on educators to find alternative ways of teaching. One method Rawson promoted was to use all the child’s senses to teach reading. As she wrote in 1971, ‘The skills are to be learned through all the avenues of learning open to the student – visual, auditory and tactile-kinesthetic, in interaction a multisensory approach.”
Another of Rawson’s achievements is the research she conducted into dyslexic learners. One of the longest research projects ever run in the US, it set out to prove that those with this language disorder who are exposed to the right teaching methods can lead successful lives. For a period of 55 years she traced the lives of 56 dyslexic learners she had taught. They became known as ‘Rawson’s boys” (even when the ‘boys” were in their 70s) and she documented their achievements, both academically and in their work life. Her research showed that, with the right education, children with dyslexia could become anything from professors and doctors to lawyers.
For Rawson, teaching was a life-long love affair that never failed to satisfy and challenge her. In a paper entitled ‘The structure of English: the language to be learned”, she wrote: ‘And so we teach the language as it is to the child as he is – a human nervous system with a unique configuration, a thinking, learning person. This will take all the knowledge, skill and wisdom we can muster in the years it takes to become professionally competent, an endlessly fascinating life-time challenge.”