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History of Reading
Speech and writing are human inventions designed for people to be able to effectively communicate with one another. Originally written communication was performed through drawings, pictures, or art of some kind. As one can readily see, with the number of words (and, hence, sentences) that are around there would have to be so many pictures that communication would become cumbersome and unwieldy. Thus was born the concept of letters joined together to make words as well as sounds.
It was in approximately 500 B.C. that the first real use of an alphabet, a syllabary, was adopted by the Greeks. This was later adapted and changed by the Romans.
The importance of a person knowing their alphabet had been stressed as far back as 360 BC when Plato wrote in his famous text, The Republic: "Just as in learning to read, I said, we were satisfied when we knew the letters of the alphabet, which are very few, in all their recurring sizes and combinations; not slighting them as unimportant whether they occupy a space large or small, but everywhere eager to make them out; and not thinking ourselves perfect in the art of reading until we recognize them wherever they are found."
In the 1st Century AD, one of the Roman Empire's premier educational writers, Quintilian, heartily endorsed the alphabetic method of reading education (i.e., letters learned first, along with their sounds, then combined into syllables and into words) and states at the beginning of Institutes of Oratory Book One: "It will be best for children, therefore, to be taught the appearances of the letters at once."
While Quintilian emphasized the necessary interaction between reading, writing and speaking, rhetoric was considered of primary importance in public life at the time and he asserted in later texts that reading and writing were basically support activities for speaking. From Classical times through the Middle Ages, it was this philosophical bent that was the most dominant and common method of reading instruction. A prime purpose of the few schools that existed was to learn to read Latin and the primary purpose of this activity was aimed at gaining the ability to copy texts, such as the Bible.
By the early 1500's, with the coming of the Reformation, there came a demand for reading by the many and not just Latin by the few. Luther in Germany, and then the Calvinists, decried that each and every person should be able to read and study the Scriptures as a means to their personal salvation. The Bible was translated and, with Guttenberg's new invention, the printing press, that book became available to virtually anyone who wished to have one.
Thus it can be seen that reading was an activity initially aimed at the act of either learning or transcribing Scriptures.
By 1600 reading the Bible was not the only thing on people's minds. In his work, Of Studies, Francis Bacon says: "Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not."
In 1635, the first "free school" opened in Virginia; however, most education in the southern colonies was still conducted at home by parents or tutors. But, in 1647, Massachusetts passed the Old Deluder Satan Act, which says, in part: "It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them in number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all children as shall resort to him to write and read."
This, then, was truly the beginning of the education system within the United States. And, while ensuring that all people had access to an education was certainly a good idea, the problem with administering classes with 10, 20, 30 or even 50 students began, as students learn at different and varying speeds. However, with the continued use of the alphabetic, or phonics, approach to initially teach children how to read, write and spell, and the concept of older students tutoring younger ones still in use, the literacy rate in America became quite high.
Up until the American Revolution, people in the U.S. learned and studied books primarily from writers and educators from England. However, lexicographer Noah Webster believed that the United States needed its own books and wrote his first educational works, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, consisting of three volumes: a spelling book, a grammar book, and a reader. A devout Patriot, Webster used numerical superscriptions to indicate vowel pronunciations and claimed that his speller would teach the nation a single system of pronunciation. His American Speller would sell somewhere around 100 million copies during its decades of use in our educational system.
The next major educational reading works, in terms of widespread use and impact on American society and education, came from university professor William Holmes McGuffey who, in 1836, began publishing his series of readers. The McGuffey Eclectic Readers were among the very first comprehensive readers specifically designed for each grade of student, enabling children to read material suitable to their age, and became probably the most influential textbooks of the 19th Century, dominating the market until about 1880.
The remarkable success of McGuffey's readers set the stage for the standard approach in reading gradation and sold some 120 million copies in total. So good were the books that in the late 20th Century those original readers were republished and are used today by Homeschoolers nationwide.
There is data available which shows that in 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent. As an example, according to the 1840 Connecticut census, only one citizen out of 579 was illiterate. Yes, there are different standards today than there were over one-and-a-half centuries ago; however, if one takes a look at the variety and complexity of works that existed in those very readers in the 1800's one will see that children then had much more expected of them than do children today.
Fast forward to the 20th Century.
At the outbreak of World War II, 18 million men took low-level academic tests before being inducted for service and, of those tested, 96 percent were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier. When the Korean War started several million men were again tested and this time literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth-grade reading proficiency. By the end of the Vietnam War, in 1973, the literacy rate had slipped to 73 percent. This, despite the fact that each generation was supposed better schooled than the previous. It is estimated today that the literacy rate for adults is near 60 percent.
Today the United States spends more than a trillion dollars a year, over $12,000 per student, more than two-and-a-half times that of 35 years ago (in constant dollars) yet the reading scores of our fourth, eighth and twelfth grade students remains virtually flat. It appears obvious from this fact alone that throwing huge amounts of money at something that needs fixing does not necessarily repair the problem.
It should be noted that the introduction of the whole word (or sight word, or whatever the latest buzz word for that approach happens to be) learning method was the key factor that started our long descent down the literacy scale.
Even the legendary best-selling children's book author, Dr. Seuss, who actually created his works from "scientific" vocabulary that was supplied to him by his publisher (education experts?), saw that the whole word approach was ruining literacy in America. In an interview he says: "I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the twenties, in which they threw out phonics reading and went to a word recognition as if you're reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds or different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country."
So devastating is the impact of functionally illiterate people in America to every aspect of life, that Congress, in 1997, charged the National Institute of Health to discover the reason why America's literacy rate was so appalling. The National Reading Panel, which was appointed, then reviewed more than 100,000 scientific and research-based studies on reading education.
The NRP released their findings in 2000 concluding that the most effective reading instruction includes each of the following:
- Teaching children to break apart and manipulate sound in words (phonemic awareness)
- Teaching that sounds are represented by letters of the alphabet, which can be blended together to form words (phonics)
- Having students practice reading aloud with guidance and feedback (guided oral reading/ fluency)
- Vocabulary development
- Applying comprehension strategies that guide and improve reading
The NRP found the effects of systematic early phonics instruction were significant in kindergarten and first grade.
Unfortunately, however, there are millions of children and adults today that do not have the benefit of having systematic phonics as part of their early reading instruction.
The Smart Way Reading and Spelling® Program
The Smart Way Reading and Spelling program was designed to assist these students. Smart Way provides one of the significant links that was missed early on for many of these students -- systematic and explicit phonics instruction. Additionally, Smart Way teaches comprehension strategies throughout the entire program.
With our targeted placement test (Franklin Assessments Decoding Skills™), the exact areas that each individual student needs help with can be located and addressed. Bright Sky Learning feels strongly that, while the subject of early reading instruction in our schools evolves into one based upon the scientifically proven methods, we must not leave the millions of children and adults whose lives are affected by low literacy skills behind.
The Smart Way program, including the more than 800 language arts worksheets, provides a significant tool that can help most, if not all, of these students to become proficient and literate.
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