Immense Debt

Thanks to Leo J. O’Donovan, S.J., for his magnificent tribute to my former professor, Karl Rahner, S.J. (11/8). I was a student at the University of Innsbruck from 1958 to 1962 and witnessed firsthand the genius and humility of this great priest-theologian.

The church owes an immense debt to Karl Rahner, who inspired so much of the renewal of the Second Vatican Council.

While Rahner could be very serious and profound, he was also very gentle and gracious. I recall sitting with him in the exam room for my oral final. Here was a struggling young American taking an oral exam in the presence of this world-renowned theologian. He pardoned my nervousness, he repeated questions in German and Latin and, like a father, complimented me to give encouragement. The students rightly called him Karl the Great.

(Most Rev.) Donald W. Trautman

Sensitive to Learning

In response to Adults Left Behind (10/11), in which William J. Byron, S.J., observed that society owes our illiterate adults something in compensation for failing them when they were children, a reader, Rudy Cypser, wrote (11/1) that this is another case of finding the root cause of symptoms and trying to do something about it.

But if the root cause of illiteracy is something that happenedor did not happento these unfortunate citizens in their early years when they were receptive to learning, can they really go back? The evidence would indicate otherwise; for hundreds of adults, it is too late now to make a substantial difference through adult remedial instruction. It is also prohibitively expensive.

This is why programs like the Harlem-based Casa de los Nios for 3- to 5-year-olds, under the direction of the Montessori Development and Training Corporation, are sorely needed if we want to interrupt the cycle of illiteracy.

The alternative to remedial programs is to catch children when they are sensitive to language development and learning in general. If you have a small child in your life, you know his constant Why?; and if you care about that child, you will not become impatient and turn off his natural curiosity by sitting him in front of the television set to be quiet; instead you will, as psychologist J. McVicker Hunt has said, match his level of readiness to know with appropriate learning activities or find an affordable institution that provides them. All the research points to this wisdom, but all too few academic programs for young children apply it effectively. Why do we wait until failure sets in and then wring our hands? Why do we waste time and throw away so many lives?

Marion Ragsdale