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ANNOUNCER:

Welcome to People in America in VOA Special English. Every week at this time, we tell the story of someone important in the history of the United States.  Today, Steve Ember and Shirley Griffith tell about Mary Lyon.  She was a leader in women's education in the nineteenth century.

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VOICE ONE:

During the nineteenth century, women's education was not considered important in the

Mary Lyon

States did require each town to provide a school for children, but teachers often were poorly prepared.  Most young women were not able to continue on with their education in private schools.

If they did, they often were not taught much except the French language, how to sew clothing, and music.

Mary Lyon felt that women's education was extremely important.  Through her lifelong work for education she became one of the most famous women in nineteenth century America.  She believed that women were teachers both in the home and in the classroom.

And, she believed that efforts to better educate young women also served God.  If women were better educated, she felt, they could teach in local schools throughout the United States and in foreign countries.

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VOICE TWO:

Mary Lyon was born in Buckland, Massachusetts, in seventeen ninety-seven.  Her father died when she was five years old.  For Mary, hard work was a way of life.  But she later remembered with great pleasure her childhood years in the home where she was born.

This is how she described what she could see from that house on a hill:

"The far-off mountains in all their grandeur, and the deep valleys, and widely extended plains, and more than all, that little village below, containing only a very few white houses, but more than those young eyes had ever seen."

VOICE ONE:

At the age of four, Mary began walking to the nearest school several kilometers away.  Later, she began spending three months at a time with friends and relatives so she could attend other area schools.  She helped clean and cook to pay for her stay.

When Mary was thirteen, her mother remarried and moved to another town.  Mary was left to care for her older brother who worked on the family farm.  He paid her a dollar a week.  She saved it to pay for her education.  Mary's love of learning was so strong that she worked and saved her small amount of pay so she could go to school for another few months.

Mary began her first teaching job at a one-room local school teaching children for the summer.  She was seventeen years old. She was paid seventy-five cents a week.  She also was given meals and a place to live.

Mary Lyon was not a very successful teacher at first.  She did not have much control over her students.  She always was ready to laugh with them.  Yet she soon won their parents' respect with her skills.

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VOICE TWO:

When Mary Lyon was twenty years old, she began a long period of study and

Mary Lyon

Mary really wanted to attend.  She sold book coverings she had made.  And she used everything she had saved from her pay as a teacher.  This was enough for her to begin attending Sanderson Academy.

At Sanderson, Mary began to study more difficult subjects.  These included science, history and Latin.  A friend who went to school with Mary wrote of her "gaining knowledge by handfuls."  It is said that Mary memorized a complete book about the Latin language in three days.  Mary later wrote it was at Sanderson that she received the base of her education.

VOICE ONE:

After a year at Sanderson Academy, Mary decided that her handwriting was not good enough to be read clearly.  She was a twenty-one-year-old woman.  But she went to the local public school and sat among the children so she could learn better writing skills.

In eighteen twenty-one, Mary Lyon went to another private school where she was taught by Reverend Joseph Emerson.  Mary said he talked to women "as if they had brains."  She praised his equal treatment of men and women when it came to educating them.

VOICE TWO:

Three years later, Mary Lyon opened a school for young women in the village of Buckland.  She called it the Buckland Female Seminary. Classes were held in a room on the third floor of a house.

Mary's students praised her teaching.  She proposed new ways of teaching, including holding discussion groups where students exchange ideas.

Mary said it was while teaching at Buckland that she first thought of founding a private school open to daughters of farmers and skilled workers.  She wanted education, not profits, to be the most important thing about the school.  At that time, schools of higher learning usually were supported by people interested in profits from their investment.

VOICE ONE:

In eighteen twenty-eight, Mary became sick with typhoid fever.  When her health improved, she decided to leave Buckland, the school she had started.  She joined a close friend, Zilpah Grant, who had begun another private school, Ipswich Female Seminary.

At Ipswich, Mary taught and was responsible for one hundred thirty students.  It was one of the best schools at the time.  But it lacked financial support.  Mary said the lack of support was because of "good men's fear of greatness in women."  Zilpah Grant and Mary Lyon urged that Ipswich be provided buildings so that the school might become permanent.  However, their appeal failed.

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VOICE TWO:

Mary resigned from Ipswich.  She helped to organize another private school for women, Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts.  It opened in eighteen thirty-five.

She also began to raise money for her dream of a permanent, non-profit school for the higher education of women.  This school would own its own property.  It would be guided by an independent group of directors.  Its finances would be the responsibility of the directors, not of investors seeking profit.  The school would not depend on any one person to continue.  And, the students would share in cleaning and cooking to keep costs down.

VOICE ONE:

Mary Lyon got a committee of advisers to help her in planning and building the school.  She collected the first thousand dollars for the school from women in and around the town of Ipswich.  At one point, she even lent the committee some of her own money.  She did not earn any money until she became head of the new school.

Mount Holyoke Seminary for Women in South Hadley, Massachusetts

Four teachers and the first class of eighty young women lived and studied in the building when the school opened.  By the next year, the number of students had increased to one hundred sixteen.  Mary knew the importance of what had been established -- the first independent school for the higher education of women.

VOICE TWO:

The school continued to grow.  More students began to attend.  The size of the building was increased.  And, all of the students were required to study for four years instead of three.

Mary Lyon was head of the school for almost twelve years.  She died in eighteen forty-nine.  She was fifty-two years old.

She left behind a school of higher education for women.  It had no debt.  And it had support for the future provided by thousands of dollars in gifts.

In eighteen ninety-three, under a state law, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary became a college.  Mount Holyoke College was the first college to offer women the same kind of education as was offered to men.

VOICE ONE:

People who have studied Mary Lyon say she was not fighting a battle of equality between men and women.  Yet she knew she wanted more for women.

Her efforts led to the spread of higher education for women in the United States.  Historians say she was the strongest influence on the education of American young people during the middle of the nineteenth century.  Her influence lasted as the many students from Mary Lyon's schools went out to teach others.

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VOICE TWO:

This Special English program was written by Vivian Bournazian.  I'm Shirley Griffith.

VOICE ONE:

And I'm Steve Ember.  Join us again next week at this same time for another People in American program on the Voice of America.

Indonesian women weep at a prayer service to commemorate the earthquake which devastated Yogyakarta region one year ago, outside Yogyakarta, 27 May 2007

The 6.2 magnitude earthquake killed nearly 6,000 people and disrupted hundreds of thousands of lives. The temblor did more than $3 billion in damage and triggered the world's largest international emergency response of 2006.

During the first months of recovery, local and international agencies churned out tens of thousands of shelters to house more than one and a half million people left homeless.

Government officials say less than 10,000 people in remote areas remain without adequate shelter.

Phil Vine with the International Federation of Red Cross Agencies says the housing operation here is a model for disaster response. The Red Cross set up small teams to build houses out of local material, such as bamboo, that is cheap, easy to use and earthquake resistant.

"What's happened here in the Yogyakarta earthquake has been seen globally as a benchmark for recovery using local materials in a low-cost way, in which the people themselves, based on the Javanese tradition of helping each other, just put these things up and rebuilt their lives in three months," said Vine.

But aid workers say as survivors focused on shelter and other immediate needs following the disaster, critical long-term sources of income were neglected.

Hadiwiyono, a farmer from the Mutihan Village in the hard-hit Klaten district, stands ankle deep in a rice paddy, tending neat green rows of shoots. The 57-year old mother of five is one among thousands of farmers who lost their homes in the quake. During last fall's growing season, fields like this one were left fallow and choked with weeds.

An elderly woman stands next to her temporary shelter nearly one year after an earthquake shuttered the region, 20 May 2007

Many farmers lost an entire planting cycle, and the fall crop was about 40 percent below normal.

Hadiwiyono says she left the fields behind because she had to work on her collapsed house. She says the first months after the quake were chaotic. But with some fertilizer and seed donations from the Food and Agriculture Organization, she is able to go back to work, her life as a rice-farmer has been restored.

FAO officials say 132 farming communities have received seed and fertilizer help, but harvests remain below normal. The program will expand to help more people.

Challenges also remain for more than a thousand people who suffered debilitating spinal injuries in the quake. Health care workers say many of those left with limited mobility have suffered severe depression. Dozens have attempted suicide.

Tatur Prianto, a Red Cross volunteer and an amateur radio hobbyist, decided to connect secluded patients over a radio network.

Prianto says two religious programs and one counseling show are broadcast each day, and participants can talk about their lives and connect with other severely injured survivors.

He says they usually share experiences on to cope with their disabilities, or how to sell flowers and other small business ideas. Sometimes they even talk about sex. He adds that he wants to see the program include more disabled people.

Phil Vine says the Red Cross will likely employ this model during future disasters.

"I can only see it expanding. I mean it's just one of those smart ideas," continued Vine. "There's a lot of counseling that goes on, and there's a lot of flirting that goes on. One of them is a budding romance between this 23-year-old who had a spinal injury, totally lost the use of her legs, and she's hooked up with one of the Indonesian ambulance drivers. And they're engaged to be married."

The International Organization for Migration and other agencies have stepped in to provide handicap-accessible housing and job opportunities for the disabled. 

Purniewen is the livelihood assistance coordinator for United Nations Development Program in Yogyakarta. He says relief agencies learned important lessons from previous disasters in Indonesia, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami in the country's Aceh province, where about 160,000 people died.

He says aid groups have learned to take advantage of community ties, with neighbors volunteering to help rebuild each other's homes. He says that helped get people back to their jobs so they could provide for their families.

"One lesson is actually that social capital is quite important in terms of fostering the recovery," said Purniewen. "Yogya has very strong social capital. Eighty percent of people are already working, not recovered, but already work again. That's an indication that social capital played a role important in this case."

The U.N. and other agencies have revived small traditional industries such as pottery, weaving and furniture production for more than four thousand households.

Aid workers say while thousands more still need assistance, restoring livelihoods is the only way to leave behind a self-reliant community.

The Chinese philosopher Confucious was reported to have said, "Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without." Why and how music has such a powerful hold on us is the subject of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Author Daniel Levitin, who appeared on VOA's Talk to America, is an expert on the subject in more ways than one.

From Record Producer to Scientist

For 15 years Levitin worked as a sound engineer and record producer with major rock music acts like Carlos Santana, Steely Dan, Chris Isaak and Blue Oyster Cult. Today, armed with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, he heads the Levitin Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal.

"I had always been asking questions about why is it that Carlos Santana is able to play a solo that moves me so much when I'm sitting in the studio and somehow that gets translated to records and millions of people have the same experience," Levitin says. He decided to go to school to find the answers.

Levitin shares what he has learned in his book, This Is Your Brain on Music, in terms that non-musicians and non-scientists can understand, answering questions like, why is it when we hear music we often want to get up and dance, or at least tap our toes?

Music, Movement and Mood

Music affects the motor cortex of the brain, making us want to get on our feet and move

Levitin notes, "People use music as mood regulation," to motivate them to exercise or get out of bed in the morning. And "they might put Billie Holiday on in the evening to calm down."

Developing a Taste for Music

On the other hand, if you grew up in certain parts of India, you might prefer to listen to ragas to de-stress in the evening. "The music culture that you are raised in forms the foundation for the kind of music you can understand, like a language," Levitin says.

People's taste in music begins to develop as early as infancy, when the human brain is processing all of the new stimuli it is exposed to, including music. "The brain begins to learn the structures and forms of the music it is exposed to," he explains. "So if you hear American or European music based on Western scales as an infant, that's the music you are going to like, as opposed to Pakistani music or Indian music or Chinese opera."

Music and Learning

Learning to play a musical instrument, especially as a child, helps us become better learners in other areas as well

But some areas of the brain respond solely to music. For example, some people who lose the ability to speak due to trauma to the inferior frontal cortex in the left hemisphere of the brain can still sing and recognize music.

At the Levitin Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise researchers have been working with people with Williams Syndrome, a genetic abnormality that affects the brain. "They can't do very much that most people can do. They can't tie their shoes; they can't read; they can't tell time," Levitin says. "They are what you would call severely mentally handicapped, but they can play music just fine, so this suggests music has its own neuro-structures."

Levitin says just why the human brain is wired for music is still unclear. One argument is that music was a by-product of the development of speech. But Daniel Levitin believes music was not just an evolutionary accident. "I actually believe that music preceded speech and was an early form of emotional communication."

Audio report above includes music