The History of Beginning Reading

Book excerpt: The puzzling adoption in 1930 of a deaf-mute method for teaching beginning reading to hearing children in America can only be understood when the long history of teaching beginning reading is known. The deaf-mute method adopted almost immediately after 1930 from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans and from Canada to Mexico was the "meaning" approach to teach the reading of alphabetic print instead of the "sound" approach. "Dick and Jane" primers and their clones, which teach beginning reading by meaning instead of by sound are, indeed, the disgraceful source for America's functional illiteracy problem. The history is an attempt to bring together most historical sources on those primers and on the long teaching of beginning reading itself so that functional illiteracy can be properly understood and successfully corrected.