Sylvia ashton warner biography of mahatma gandhi

As an educator she developed and applied concepts of organic, child-based learning to the teaching of reading and writing, and vocabulary techniques, still used today. Ashton-Warner was born on 17 December in Stratford, New Zealand , one of ten children born to Francis Ashton-Warner, a bookkeeper, and Margaret Maxwell, a schoolteacher 14 years his junior.

My Experiment with Truth is the

When Francis's health deteriorated, Margaret became the sole breadwinner, thus needing to take the younger children to school with her to sit in her classroom while she taught. The older children were left at home with their mostly bedridden father. As a novelist, she produced several works centered on strong female characters. Ashton-Warner was invited to the Aspen Community School in October and to present at the University of Colorado 's third annual reading conference the following June.

As a young woman, Ashton-Warner trained as a pianist, practising up to five hours a day for years before she turned to teaching. They married in Wellington on August 23, Together they had three children: Jasmine, Elliot and Ashton. The couple worked together for many years, often with Henderson as headmaster and Ashton-Warner as infant mistress.

Ashton-Warner died on April 28, in Tauranga , with two of her children by her side. Ashton-Warner's ideas for a child-based, organic approach to the teaching of reading and writing, including her key vocabulary techniques, are still used and debated internationally today. The Faculty of Education library at the University of Auckland — the institution at which she trained in and — was named the Sylvia Ashton-Warner Library in The Ashton School in the Dominican Republic was founded in and named in honour of Ashton-Warner, whose teaching methods inspired the school.

While Ashton-Warner had a somewhat troubled relationship with New Zealand, [ 14 ] the country has claimed her as its own. In August , the University of Auckland held a conference to commemorate the centennial of Ashton-Warner's birth.