History of a Gimmick
[15] When I wrote my book Why Johnny Can't Read twenty-five years
ago, I wrote a chapter on the history of look-and-say, tracing it back to a
primer called The New Word Method, published
in 1846. I got that information from the book American Reading Instruction by Nila Banton Smith.
It turned out that
Professor Smith and I were wrong. In 1966, eleven years after I wrote Why Johnny Can't Read, there appeared Teaching to Read, Historically Considered by Dr. Mitford M.
Mathews, the famous linguist and editor of the monumental Dictionary of Americanisms. Dr. Mathews went into the matter with
meticulous scholarship and settled it once and for all. The first look-and-say
primer was written in 1791 by a German educator, Professor Friedrich Gedike,
director of the Kölnische Gymnasium in Berlin.
Herr Professor Gedike was a
fervent believer in the educational theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He said
teaching should follow nature. Nature presented Man with wholes—a flower, a
tree, an animal, a mountain. To learn about those wholes, Man had to analyze
what they were made of, going from the whole to its parts.
In an essay written in
1779 Gedike applied this idea to the teaching of reading. Reading instruction
too, he wrote, should go from the whole—that is, the word—to its parts—the
letters.
It took Gedike twelve
years, till 1791, to translate this idea into a workable primer. It was called Kinderbuch zur ersten Übung im Lesen ohne
ABC und Buchstabieren, which means "Children's Book for the First
Practice in Reading without the ABC's and Spelling." He taught his
five-year-old daughter with it and had her reading within two months.
[16] Please note two
things about this original look-and-say primer. First of all, it was aimed
squarely at the market of affectionate middle-class parents. Ever since the
invention of the alphabet 3,500 years ago, parents had been exasperated with
the job of teaching their children to read. Small children simply hated to
spend months on end in laboriously learning the ABC's, the standard first
syllables ba, be, bi, bo, bu,
and the seemingly endless drill they had to go through before they were allowed
to read their first words. And yet this method had been in use for some 3,000
years simply because nobody had figured out any other way. So Gedike proudly
called his primer a book "for the first practice in reading without the
ABCs and spelling." Obviously he knew he was onto something.
How did he do it? He did
it with a gimmick. Each page of his book had words containing one specific
letter of-the alphabet, say m or f
or b. Each word was printed so that
the letter to be learned stood out, printed in red, with the rest of the
letters in black, or vice versa. When the child had learned the words on the
page, presumably the featured letter had sunk in and would be remembered. By
the end of the book the child had learned a long list of words and incidentally all the letters of the
alphabet.
How would the child go on
from there? How would he or she learn the rest of the tens of thousands of
words in the German language? For this question Professor Gedike had an
ingenious answer. "Don't think," he wrote in his preface, "that
the child by this method knows only the words he has actually learned. . . .
No! Through the mysterious sense of analogy he will increasingly find out words
on his own or, if you will, learn to
guess. At the same time, he will sense, even more mysteriously, why it must
be this word and no other."
There you have it. In the
world's first look-and-say book, the method is already exposed as a gimmick. No
more torturous learning of the alphabet, no more boring syllable drills, simply
teach the child a list of words and he'll "mysteriously" catch on to
the sounds the letters stand for and learn to read on his own. Parents, save
yourself and your child from unpleasantness and buy my book.
Only of course it turned
out the gimmick didn't work. Little Gretchen Gedike (or whatever her name was)
may have [17] learned to read at her learned father's knee, but few other
German children did so with his book. It went through three editions and then
dropped from sight. Children in Germany and elsewhere kept on being drilled in
the ABCs and ba, be, bi, bo, bu.
Some thirty years passed
until the next look-and-say educator, Professor Jean Joseph Jacotot, arrived on
the scene with La Langue Maternelle ("The
Mother Tongue"). Monsieur Jacotot's method wasn't just a gimmick like
Gedike's but a monstrosity.
Jacotot was a child
prodigy. At nineteen he was appointed professor of Latin at the University of
Dijon. He then studied law, practiced for a while, and also studied higher
mathematics on the side. Then came the French Revolution. He joined the army,
became an artillery captain and fought in the Belgian campaign. After the war
he went back to Dijon and taught science, math, and Roman law. For a time he
was a member of the French Parlement in Paris. After the Bourbons returned, he
emigrated to Belgium and became Professor of French at the University of
Louvain.
In 1823 he wrote the book L'Enseignement universel ("Universal
Instruction"), which made him famous. One part of it dealt with the
teaching of reading. There Jacotot went back to his experience in teaching Flemish-speaking
university students how to speak and read French. He'd given them copies of the
widely read French novel Les Aventures de
Télémaque by Fénelon, in an edition printed in parallel columns, French on
the left and Flemish on the right. Pretty soon Jacotot found that his students
learned to read French by themselves.
Why not apply this
principle to small children learning to read their native language? What
Jacotot proposed, unbelievably, was this: Let the teacher read to the children
the whole four-hundred-page novel Télémaque,
several times if necessary. Then, when they have fully grasped the contents
of the novel, start over again on page 1, read aloud the first sentence, and
analyze it in detail, first the individual words and then each letter in each
word. Once you have done this with every sentence in the book, the children
know how to read. Incidentally, the first sentence of Télémaque was: "Calypso was unable to console herself for the
departure of Ulysses."
[18] German educators, always eager to apply new theories, tried the
Jacotot method but found it a little cumbersome. Why not just use one sentence
instead of a whole novel? they asked, with some justification. So, in 1830,
there appeared the first German primer à la Jacotot by a German named Friedrich
Weingart. Weingart's first sentence to be read and analyzed by the children was
this:
Socrates, the wise son of Sophroniscus, spoke
one day in the circle of his students of the all-powerful foresight of divine
providence—how it sees everything and hears everything and is present
everywhere and takes care of everything, and how a man the more he feels and
recognizes it the more he honors it.
Other German
educators felt that Weingart's opening sentence was a trifle long, so they
came out with primers starting with shorter sentences and finally with primers
starting with single words. The children were taught those words and what each letter in each word stood for.
This was the beginning of the German "Normal Word method," which soon
conquered Germany and all of Europe. In essence, it's what we today call phonics.
Around the time
Jacotot made his big splash in Europe, an American, Thomas H. Gallaudet,
reinvented the look-and-say method in the United States.
Gallaudet had for
many years been working with deaf mutes. He had developed a purely visual
method of teaching them to read and felt it could and should also be used in
teaching normal children. What he had done was this: he'd put fifty words like horse, dog, cat on little cards,
let the children memorize them by sight, and then taught them the letters by
analyzing the words. In 1836 he published his invention under the title A Mother's Primer.
Other
authors—Josiah Bumstead, John Russell Webb, and Samuel Worcester—also came out
with look-and-say primers around the same time. They didn't have such an
unusual background but the principle was the same. Each of those primers
started with a lengthy list of words to be learned during the first weeks of
school before the children were set to work on letters and the alphabet.
[19] Another author of a
new look-and-say primer was Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann, the second wife of the
famous educator Horace Mann. Her book didn't mention the alphabet or letters at
all, but that didn't stop her husband from giving it a friendly review.
"It is a beautiful book," he wrote. "It is prepared on the same
general principles with those of Worcester, Gallaudet, and Bumstead; and it
contains two or three reading lessons and a few cuts for drawing, in addition
to a most attractive selection of words."
In 1843 Mann went with his
wife to Europe and spent an hour in a Prussian classroom during a reading lesson.
Although he didn't know a word of German, his wife interpreted for him what was
happening. Nevertheless, he misunderstood completely what the teacher was
doing—he was using the by then standard "normal word method"—and
thought this was a demonstration of look-and-say.
When he came back to the
United States, Mann wrote his famous Seventh Annual Report to the Massachusetts
Board of Education and recommended passionately the use of look-and-say. He
wrote about the methods used by Gallaudet, Bumstead, Worcester, his wife, and the
Prussian schoolteacher, mixing it all together in a frontal attack on the
prevailing method of teaching children with the alphabet and ba, be,
bi, bo, bu.
A committee of thirty-one
Boston grammar school masters came up with a lengthy answer, insisting that
look-and-say produced very poor spellers and anyway didn't work when it came to
reading unfamiliar words.
Within a few years after
that "great debate" in Massachusetts, the various look-and-say
primers went out of fashion and the alphabetic or phonic methods kept on being
used in the nation's classrooms.
A quarter century passed.
Then, almost unnoticed, look-and-say made a reappearance. In 1881, Mr. George
L. Farnham, principal of the State Normal School in Peru, Nebraska, wrote a
small book, The Sentence Method of
Teaching Reading, Writing, and Spelling. It achieved a certain underground
fame and went into three editions.
Farnham went beyond the
earlier look-and-say proponents and suggested that children should start their
reading and writing lessons with whole sentences. "The teacher goes to the
[20] board," he wrote, "and in a clear bold hand writes a sentence,
as: 'I have a knife.' The pupils see the writing, but of course do not know
what it means. The teacher will call a pupil and put a knife into his hands,
and the pupil in response to the impulse which is the result of previous
training will instantly hold up the knife and say 'I have a knife.' "
And so on, until the
children "attain great excellence in writing and reading at an early
period."
As to the letters,
"the teacher will speak of the letters as though they were known to the
pupils, showing the size of the m's, t's, /'s etc., and it will soon be
discovered that the pupils can distinguish the letters and name them." So
much for that.
Far from being ridiculed,
Farnham's method was soon widely imitated, and many publishers put out
sentence- or story-method primers. One of them was the Elson Readers of the Scott,
Foresman Company in Chicago, to which I’ll return a little later.
And now the curtain goes
up for the entrance of the great national leader of look-and-say, Colonel
Francis Wayland Parker.
Parker was a great big
bear of a man with a booming voice, a hearty laugh, and an abiding love for
little children. He started as superintendent of public schools in Quincy,
Massachusetts, and soon became nationally famous. In 1883 the city of Chicago
called him in as principal of the Cook County Normal School.
Parker's ideas on
educational reform are explained in his book Talks on Pedagogics. On the subject of reading he said:
From the time the child first enters school, the purpose
of the teacher should be to continue in the best possible way the spontaneous
activities of the child in the directions which nature has so effectively
begun. We will suppose, then, that he has lessons, experiments, observations,
and investigations in all the central subjects; that they form the core of the
work done by the teacher; that the child's mind, his whole being, is brought
face to face with the truth,—the intrinsic knowledge,—and consequently [21] with intrinsic thought; and that at the moment
when the word is required, it is given orally, and at once written rapidly, in
a plain, beautiful hand upon the black-board. . . .
It is easy for a skillful teacher to arouse an
intense interest in an educative subject. Just at the moment when the interest
is at its height, she introduces a word orally, immediately writes it upon the
blackboard, erases it, after one glance by her pupils, and says, "Say that
with the chalk!" The little ones rush to the board, under a strong desire
to express the thought, and quickly reproduce the word.
After some
sixteen years of this kind of teaching the Cook County
Board of Education had had enough and Parker had to resign his post. But at that critical moment the look-and-say movement
was rescued by Mrs. Anita McCormick Blaine.
Mrs. Blaine was
the daughter of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the harvesting machine, and an
heiress to the McCormick fortune. She was deeply interested in educational
reforms. When her son, Emmons junior, reached the age of six and had to start
on his education, she looked carefully for the proper kind of school to send
him to. When she heard of Colonel Parker, she visited his school and asked to
see one of the reading classes. Parker proudly answered, "We haven't
any," and Mrs. Blaine was instantly overwhelmed. When he lost his job a
few years later, she contributed a million dollars to set up a new school for
him under the wing of the University of Chicago. It became world-famous and
attracted pilgrimages from progressive educators everywhere.
But let's go on.
The next hero of the look-and-say movement is Edmund Burke Huey, author of The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, which
appeared in 1908. It instantly became the bible of the movement.
Huey went over the
whole history of the alphabet, writing, and reading, and included a complete
survey of how reading was taught in America at that time. On the basis of his
psychological theory, he came out squarely for look-and-say teaching [22]
à la Parker, only if possible more so. At the end of his book he summed it all
up in thirteen "practical pedagogical conclusions." The first four were:
1.
The
home is the natural place for learning to read, in connection with the child's
introduction to literature through story-telling, picture-reading, etc. . . .
2.
The
school should cease to make primary reading the fetish that it long has been,
and should construct a primary course in which reading and writing will be
learned secondarily, and only as they serve a purpose felt as such by the
pupil, the reading being always for meaning.
3.
The
technique of reading should not appear in the early years, and the very little early
work that should be tolerated in phonics should be entirely distinct from
reading.
4.
The
child should never be permitted to read for the sake of reading, as a formal
process or end in itself. The reading should always be for the intrinsic
interest or value of what is read, reading never being done or thought of as
"an exercise." Word-pronouncing will therefore always be secondary to
getting whole sentence-meanings, and this from the very first.
On the question of what
the children are supposed to read, point 13 contained an illuminating sentence:
The literature of Teutonic feudalism and chivalry and of
medieval romanticism seems especially suited to the nature and interests of
adolescents.
Having unburdened himself
of this strange new gospel on how to teach reading, Huey turned away from the
field and went back to his first love, work with the mentally deficient. He
spent the next five years preparing a book on that subject, but the manuscript
was completely destroyed by fire. He died at the age of forty-three in 1913.
What with the fame of the
Parker school and the wide influence of Huey's book, look-and-say now began to
come into its own. More and more private schools adopted the system, and an
ever-increasing number of publishers brought out texts to serve the movement.
In New York City, Columbia University [23] Teachers College embraced
look-and-say together with progressive education, and the University of
Chicago and other institutions followed suit.
The two foremost leaders
were Professor Arthur I. Gates of Columbia and Professor William S. Gray at
Chicago. In 1929 the Scott, Foresman Company invited Professor Gray to revamp
their Elson Readers, and this marked the birth of Dick and Jane. A year later,
Professor Gates joined up with Macmillan and produced a look-and-say series
for them. Gradually most major textbook houses fell in line and the
"Dismal Dozen" of basal readers came into being.
By the middle thirties
look-and-say had completely swept the field. Virtually all leading academics in
the primary reading field were now authors of basal reader series and collected
fat royalties. They had inherited the kingdom of American education.
Inevitably that huge
bonanza created problems. Look-and-say, after all, was still essentially a
gimmick with no scientific foundations whatever. As it had for 150 years, it
produced children who couldn't accurately read unfamiliar words. From the fourth
grade up, textbooks in all subjects had to be "dumbed down" to accommodate
them. Grade promotions had to be based on age rather than achievement. High
school diplomas were given to functional illiterates. Colleges had to adjust to
an influx of students who couldn't read. The national illiteracy rate climbed
year after year after year.
The educational
Establishment, with primary reading at its core, became a beleaguered fortress.
In 1956 the International Reading Association was founded, and began to
function as a look-and-say defense league. It now has over 65,000 members and
publishes three journals, The Reading Teacher, The Journal of Reading and The Reading Research Quarterly. They're
filled with articles defending the indefensible system of teaching reading.
This national tragedy was
followed by high comedy. In the early sixties, after the original
standard-bearers of look-and-say had died or retired, a new generation of
academics took over. Look-and-say became "psycholinguistics" and
reading mistakes became "miscues." Professor Frank Smith and Professors
Kenneth and Yetta Goodman invented a new science to [24] clothe shabby old
look-and-say in shiny new garments.
Let's first have a look at
Professors Kenneth and Yetta Goodman. They are husband and wife; he's now
senior author of the Scott, Foresman series, having inherited the mantle of William
S. Gray.
Professor Kenneth Goodman defines
reading as "a psycholinguistic process by which the reader reconstructs,
as best he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic
display."
Note the words "as
best he can." Goodman, surrounded by two generations of
look-and-say-trained Americans, assumes as a matter of course that everybody
makes mistakes all the time. These mistakes he calls miscues—"in order to
avoid value implications," as he puts it.
You'd think the fact that
most Americans no longer can read accurately is deplorable. But the Goodmans
don't feel that way. They first started a Reading Miscue Center at Wayne State
University in Detroit, and then produced a brand-new, highly expensive,
diagnostic reading test, The Miscue Reading Inventory—to be given to individual
children orally. Naturally, this takes vastly more time and money than
conventional written tests given to groups, but this is considered unimportant.
Educational journals are
full of studies of how to apply the Miscue Reading Inventory. For instance, in
the April 1978 issue of Reading Teacher, Professor
Dixie Lee Spiegel writes:
The development of confidence and risk-taking strategies
within children can only evolve in a climate of acceptance and encouragement in
which the students are rewarded for a good try. Children should be encouraged
to take a risk and to make a good guess, using all the data that are available
and that they know how to use. They should receive praise for a good guess even
though it is not completely accurate. For example, if a child reads "I
like to eat carrots" as "I like to eat cake," praise should be
given for supplying a word that makes sense and follows at least some of the
phonic cues. The teacher may also choose to supply the correct response in an
offhand and uncritical manner. If the child read the sentence as [25] "I
like to eat cars," the teacher should remind the reader that that does not
make sense.
I could easily fill this
book with similar examples of current scholarship in the field of reading
instruction, but this will give you a good idea of what's going on. For the
look-and-say educators reading is now a matter of "guessing,"
"cues," "strategies"—never of simply looking at what's on
the page and, if necessary, sounding out the words. Professor Kenneth Goodman
even wrote a paper called "Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing
Game," which was reprinted several times in college anthologies.
Not long ago, in the
November 1979 issue of the magazine Learning,
a Goodman disciple summed it all up. Mr. Barry Sherman, a reading
consultant in private practice, offered the following advice to students:
Always try to make sense of everything you read.
When you come to a word or phrase you don't know, guess
that it is a word or phrase that looks like the one in the text and that has
the meaning called for in the sentence.
If you can't think of a word or phrase that looks like
the one in the text, choose something that has the meaning you seem to need and
read on.
If you must skip a word, say "blank" and go on
reading.
When you come to an unfamiliar name of a person,
recognize what kind of word it is, then choose a substitute name for the
character and stick to it.
When you come to phrases that tell who is talking, such
as "she whispered," "he exclaimed" and "they
replied," you can always use the word said
in place of whispered, exclaimed and replied. The important thing is to keep reading.
If you cannot figure out the meaning of a word, try to
decide if it is a name of something or if it tells what something is, has or
does; then keep reading.
On July 9, 1973, Professor
Kenneth Goodman made his miscue theory nationally famous by giving an interview
to the [26] New
York Times. The interviewer asked him: "A student
learning to read comes upon the sentence 'The boy jumped on the horse and rode
off.' But instead of saying 'horse,' the student substitutes 'pony.' Should the
teacher correct him?
Professor
Goodman's answer was a firm no.
"The child
clearly understands the meaning," he said. "This is what reading is
all about."
What Professor
Goodman apparently didn't know is that the Merck
Manual, the standard reference source for doctors, lists as one of the
symptoms of dyslexia—also called "congenital word blindness" or
"primary reading disability"— the "tendency to substitute words
for those he cannot read."
And now, to
finish this chapter, let me introduce you to the apostle of psycholinguistics,
Professor Frank Smith. Smith is a charismatic leader in the direct line of Parker
and Huey. He has written three books, Understanding
Reading (1971), Psycholinguistics and
Reading (1973), and Reading Without
Nonsense (1979). They all preach the same gospel, but as the years went by
and Smith acquired a fanatic following, his books became less textbooky and
more inspirational. Reading Without
Nonsense no longer has any footnotes, bibliography, or other customary
scholarly apparatus. It's pure Smith, one glittering paradox after another.
Listen:
Skill in reading depends on using the eyes as little
as possible. (page 9)
Meaning is not something that a reader or
listener gets from language, but
something that is brought to language.
(page 9)
If you are not making errors when you read, you
are probably not reading efficiently. (page 33)
When we identify meaning in text, it is not
necessary to identify individual words. (page 117)
However, the most
amusing passage in Smith's book is not one of those paradoxes, but the
following (from pages 51-52):
The Fallacy of Phonics: The issue concerns the number and nature of the
correspondence between the letters of the written language and the sounds of
speech. There would be a perfect "one-to-one correspondence" between [27] the two aspects of language if every letter stood
for just one sound and every sound was represented by just one letter. Then
indeed we might help children to read by getting them to learn the rules of
spelling-to-sound correspondence. In the same mechanical way we could also
employ computers to convert written language into speech to the great advantage
of the blind. . . . The reason phonics does not work for children or for
computers is that the links between the letters and sounds cannot be specified.
. . . They are too complex."
This would be a splendid
argument against phonics except for the awkward fact that the first Kurzweil
Reading Machine was publicly demonstrated on January 13, 1976. It used a phonics-based
program fed into a computer. There are now two hundred such machines in use in
forty-eight states, England, Australia, and Canada.
The other day I listened
to a Kurzweil machine in New York City read a page or two from a book on
American history. It has an indefinable, vaguely foreign-sounding accent, but
that only adds to the sheer awe-inspiring magic of its performance.
REFERENCES
Chapter 2: History of a Gimmick
Page
15 Mathews, Mitford M. Teaching
to Read, Historically Considered. University of Chicago Press, 1966.
19 Farnham, George L. The
Sentence Method of Teaching Reading, Writing, and Spelling. (2nd ed.)
Syracuse, N.Y., 1887.
20 Parker, Francis W. Talks on
Pedagogics. New York, A. S. Barnes, 1894.
21 Harrison, Gilbert A. A
Timeless Affair: The Life of Anita McCormick Blaine. University of Chicago
Press, 1979.
21 Huey, Edmund Burke. The
Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. New York, Macmillan, 1908.
24 Goodman, Kenneth. "Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game."
In Singer, Harry, and Ruddell, Robert B., eds., Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading. (2nd ed.) Newark,
Del., International Reading Association, 1976, Pp. 497-508.
24 Spiegel, Dixie L.
"Meaning-Seeking Strategies for the Beginning Reader." Reading
Teacher, April 1978, pp. 772776.
25 Sherman, Barry.
"Reading for Meaning." Learning, November 1979, pp. 41-44.
26 Fiske, Edward B.
"Approach to Reading Rethought" (interview with Kenneth Goodman). New York Times,
July 9, 1973.
26 Smith, Frank. Understanding
Reading. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971.
26 —. Psycholinguistics
and Reading. New York, Holt, Rinehart
& Winston, 1973.
26 ___ . Reading Without
Nonsense. New York, Teachers College Press, 1979.
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