Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

LEARNING TO READ
eading out loud, reading silently, being able to carry in the mind intimate libraries of remembered
words, are astounding abilities that we acquire by uncertain methods. And yet, before these abilities can
be acquired, a reader needs to learn the basic craft of recognizing the common signs by which a society
has chosen to communicate: in other words, a reader must learn to read. Claude Lévi-Strauss tells how,
when he was travelling among the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil, his hosts, seeing him write, took his
pencil and paper and drew squiggly lines in imitation of his letters and demanded that he “read” what
they had written. The Nambikwara expected their scribbles to be as immediately significant to Lévi-
Strauss as those he drew himself. For Lévi-Strauss, taught to read in a European school, the notion that a
system of communication should be immediately comprehensible to any other person seemed absurd. The
methods by which we learn to read not only embody the conventions of our particular society regarding
literacy — the channelling of information, the hierarchies of knowledge and power — they also determine
and limit the ways in which our ability to read is put to use.
I lived for a year in Sélestat, a small French town twenty miles south of Strasbourg, in the middle of the
Alsatian plain between the Rhine River and the Vosges Mountains. There, in the small municipal library,
are two large handwritten notebooks. One is 300 pages long, the other 480; in both the paper has
yellowed over the centuries, but the writing, in different colours of ink, is still surprisingly clear. Later in
life, their owners had the notebooks bound in order to preserve them better, but when they were in use
they were little more than bundles of folded pages, probably bought at a bookseller’s stall in one of the
local markets. Open to the gaze of the library’s visitors, they are — a typed card explains — the notebooks
of two of the students who attended the Latin school of Sélestat in the last years of the fifteenth century,
from 1477 to 1501: Guillaume Gisenheim, of whose life nothing is known except what his schoolboy’s
notebook tells us, and Beatus Rhenanus, who was to become a leading figure in the humanist movement
and the editor of many of the works of Erasmus.
In Buenos Aires, in the first few grades, we too had “reading” notebooks, laboriously handwritten and
painstakingly illustrated with coloured crayons. Our desks and benches were fixed to each other by cast-
iron brackets and set in long rows of two, leading (the symbol of power did not escape us) up to the
teacher’s desk, high on a wooden platform, behind which loomed the blackboard. Each desk was pierced
to hold a white porcelain inkpot into which we plunged the metal nibs of our pens; we were not allowed to
use fountain-pens until grade three. Centuries from now, if some scrupulous librarian were to exhibit
those notebooks as precious objects in glass cases, what would a visitor discover? From the patriotic texts
copied out in tidy paragraphs, the visitor might deduce that in our education the rhetoric of politics
superseded the niceties of literature; from our illustrations, that we learned to transform these texts into
slogans (“The Malvinas Belong To Argentina” became two hands linked around a pair of ragged islands;
“Our Flag Is The Emblem Of Our Homeland”, three strips of colour blowing in the wind). From the
identical glosses the visitor might learn that we were taught to read not for pleasure or for knowledge but
merely for instruction. In a country where inflation was to attain a monthly 200 per cent, this was the only
way to read the fable of the grasshopper and the ant.
In Sélestat there were several different schools. A Latin school had existed since the fourteenth century,
lodged on church property and maintained by both the municipal magistrate and the parish. The original
school, the one attended by Gisenheim and Rhenanus, had occupied a house on the Marché-Vert, in front
of the eleventh-century church of St. Foy. In 1530 the school had become more prestigious and had moved
to a larger building across from the thirteenth-century church of St. George, a two-storey house that
carried on its façade an inspiring fresco depicting the nine muses sporting in the sacred fountain of
Hippocrene, on Mount Helicon. With the transfer of the school, the name of the street changed from
Lottengasse to Babilgasse, in reference to the babbling (in Alsatian dialect, bablen, “to babble”) of the
students. I lived only a couple of blocks away.
From the beginnings of the fourteenth century, there exist full records of two German schools in Sélestat;
then, in 1686, the first French school was opened, thirteen years after Louis XIV took possession of the
town. These schools taught reading, writing, singing and a little arithmetic in the vernacular, and were
open to all. An admission contract for one of the German schools, around the year 1500, notes that the
teacher would instruct “members of the guilds and others from the age of twelve on, as well as those
children unable to attend the Latin school, boys as well as girls.” Unlike those attending the German
schools, students were admitted to the Latin school at the age of six, and remained there until they were

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ready for university at thirteen or fourteen. A few became assistants to the teacher and stayed on until
the age of twenty.
Though Latin continued to be the language of bureaucracy, ecclesiastical affairs and scholarship in most
of Europe until well into the seventeenth century, by the early sixteenth century the vernacular languages
were gaining ground. In 1521, Martin Luther began publication of his German Bible; in 1526, William
Tyndale brought out his English translation of the Bible in Cologne and Worms, having been forced to
leave England under threat of death; in 1530, in both Sweden and Denmark, a government decree
prescribed that the Bible was to be read in church in the vernacular. In Rhenanus’s days, however, the
prestige and official use of Latin continued not only in the Catholic Church, where priests were required
to conduct services in Latin, but also in universities such as the Sorbonne, which Rhenanus wished to
attend. Latin schools were therefore still in great demand.
Schools, Latin and otherwise, provided a certain degree of order in the chaotic existence of students in
the late Middle Ages. Because scholarship was seen as the seat of a “third power” positioned between the
Church and the State, students were granted a number of official privileges from the twelfth century on.
In 1158, the German Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa exempted them from the jurisdiction of
secular authorities except in serious criminal cases, and guaranteed them safe conduct when travelling. A
privilege accorded by King Philippe Auguste of France in 1200 forbade the Provost of Paris to imprison
them under any excuse. And from Henry III onwards, each English monarch guaranteed secular immunity
to the students at Oxford.
To attend school, students had to pay tax-fees, and they were taxed according to their bursa, a unit based
on their weekly bed and board. If they were unable to pay, they had to swear that they were “without
means of support” and sometimes they were granted fellowships assured by subventions. In the fifteenth
century, poor students accounted for 18 per cent of the student body in Paris, 25 per cent in Vienna and
19 per cent in Leipzig. Privileged but penniless, anxious to preserve their rights but uncertain about how
to make a living, thousands of students roamed the land, living off alms and larceny. A few survived by
pretending to be fortune-tellers or magicians, selling miraculous trinkets, announcing eclipses or
catastrophes, conjuring up spirits, predicting the future, teaching prayers to rescue souls from purgatory,
giving out recipes to guard crops against hail and cattle against disease. Some claimed to be descendants
of the Druids and boasted that they had entered the Mountain of Venus, where they had been initiated
into the secret arts; as a sign of this, they wore capes of yellow netting over their shoulders. Many went
from town to town following an older cleric whom they served and from whom they sought instruction;
the teacher was known as a bacchante (not from “Bacchus” but from the verb bacchari, “to roam”), and
his disciples were called Schützen (protectors) in German or bejaunes (dunces) in French. Only those who
were determined to become clerics or to enter some form of civil service would seek the means to leave
the road and enter a learning establishment like the Latin school in Sélestat.
The students who attended the Latin school in Sélestat came from different parts of Alsace and Lorraine,
and even farther, from Switzerland. Those who belonged to rich bourgeois or noble families (as was the
case with Beatus Rhenanus) could choose to be lodged in the boarding-house run by the rector and his
wife, or to stay as paying guests at the house of their private tutor, or even at one of the local inns. But
those who had sworn that they were too poor to pay their fees had great difficulties in finding room and
board. The Swiss Thomas Platter, who arrived at the school in 1495 at the age of eighteen “knowing
nothing, unable even to read [the best-known of medieval grammar primers, the Ars de octo partibus