Shame and learning to read

Text 1: The Ploughboy’s Letters, by Josiah Brant

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I was seventeen years of age before I could read my own name, and I had been a ploughboy for nine of them. In our parish there was no school a labouring family could spare a son to, and my father held, not unkindly, that a man who could read would only grow discontented with a plough. I did not think much about it until the winter I was courting a girl at the mill, and she sent me a note, and I was obliged to carry it in my pocket for three days before I dared ask the shepherd what it said.

That spring I went to the Sunday school. The superintendent, a kind man with very little patience, set me among the infants, because I knew less than they did, and I sat for a month on a bench made for children with my knees near my chin, spelling c-a-t aloud while girls of seven corrected me. I believe I was never so ashamed, not even when I was flogged for losing a sheep. Twice I walked to the door of the school and turned back. The letters themselves were hard enough; they wriggled on the page like eels in a bucket. But it was the little girls I could not bear.

I persevered, I hardly know why. By harvest I could read a chapter slowly, and by the next winter I had read an old almanac from cover to cover and a tract on the management of bees, which I can still repeat. My father watched me reading by the fire and said nothing for a long while. Then he said I had got above myself. Perhaps I had. Reading took me out of his house as surely as a ship, though I never left the parish.

Text 2: The Bear Book, by Lee Hartigan

An original contemporary memoir.

For twenty years I was very good at not reading. I could get through a whole day at the depot without anybody guessing. I memorised the shapes of words on delivery notes. I said I had left my glasses at home. When the lads went for a curry I let someone else order and said ‘Same as him.’ It was exhausting, the way carrying something heavy is exhausting even when you stop noticing the weight.

What finally broke it was my daughter. She was six and she brought home a book about a bear who loses his hat, and she wanted me to read it to her. I made up a story about the pictures instead. She let me finish, and then she said, ‘Dad, that’s not what it says.’ I went outside and stood by the bins for a long time.

The adult class met in a library on Tuesday nights. There were nine of us: a retired nurse, two lads younger than me, a woman who had come from Eritrea and spoke four languages but could not read English. On the first night nobody looked at anybody. By the third week we were laughing at our own mistakes, which I would not have believed possible. The work itself was slow and boring and sometimes made my head ache, but it was never the problem. The problem had always been the hiding. It took me eighteen months to read the bear book properly. My daughter was eight by then and too old for it, but she sat on my knee anyway and let me get to the end.

‘Both writers show that the hardest part of learning to read was the shame rather than the difficulty.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the challenges each writer faced in learning to read
• explain how far you agree that shame was harder for both writers than the difficulty of reading
• compare the ways the writers present their experiences of learning.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.