How We Learn and How We Should be Taught: An Introduction to the Work of Caleb Gattegno

Abstract

Young and Messum’s title is a welcome addition to the literature, the first of two volumes aiming to re-present the work of Caleb Gattegno (1911–1988) to a new generation of teachers. During the 1970s and 1980s, many language teachers encountered the Silent Way or heard about it at some remove. They may associate it with coloured rods and word charts, but the Silent Way is neither of those things and is better seen as the language learning application of Gattegno’s much larger vision for education, the Subordination of Teaching to Learning. Gattegno was a scientist, mathematician, psychologist, investigator of human learning, and polyglot (English, which he spoke and wrote both fluently and elegantly was his fifth or sixth language.) Some readers of this review will recall a number of Gattegno’s publications, in particular The Common Sense of Teaching Foreign Languages ([1976] 2010), The Universe of Babies ([1973] 2010), and What we Owe Children ([1971] 2010). More widely read, perhaps, were Earl Stevick’s accounts of the Silent Way, especially in Memory Meaning Method(1976) and Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways(1980). The authors of the title under review would probably describe themselves as committed students of Gattegno’s work. Roslyn Young met Gattegno in 1971 when she saw him teaching Chinese the Silent Way, and Piers Messum met him in Japan in the 1980s while learning Japanese through the Silent Way.