For nearly 200 years there has been a controversy in the United States over how to teach reading.
In colonial days the New England Primer and, later, McGuffey’s Reader had an “alphabetic column.” It listed the alphabet (in capitals and lower case), the vowels, and syllables using the vowels. Children were to learn the sounds of letters before learning whole words.
In 1841, Horace Mann, the first Massachusetts Secretary of Education, complained about this method of teaching children: “[T]he alphabetic column presents an utter blank. There stands in silence and death, the stiff, perpendicular row of characters, lank, stark, immovable, without form or comeliness and, as to signification, wholly void.” These characters made the children “feel so deathlike.” [1]
Mann preferred a “far better and more philosophical mode,—whole words should be taught before teaching the letters of which they are composed.”[2] In his view, reading would be more rewarding if children could capture words and their meanings, without having first to go through the drudgery of memorizing the sounds of each letter of the alphabet and sounds of their combinations.
It may have been drudgery, but historian Albert Fishlow calculates that about 90 percent of white adults throughout the nation could read and write by 1840.[3]
In any case, the “reading wars” began and continue today. The wars are between teaching children to “sound out” words (this is called phonics, a term coined by Mann) and teaching whole words that children can recognize by sight (called whole language). The phonics approach is embodied in what is now known as the “science of reading,” based on research confirming that learning sounds is a key element (not the only element) of reading education.
The Old Days
If you learned to read in the 1950s or 1960s, you were probably taught by whole language, also called “look-say.” The Dick and Jane readers were the most popular introductory texts. In 1955, however, Rudolf Flesch issued a full-throated challenge to this way of teaching, his book Why Can’t Johnny Read? It was a best-seller, it promoted phonics, and it caused a furor.
Critics disparaged Flesch’s ideas and shredded his evidence. Writing in the Journal of Pediatrics, Janice Schmidt Hobkirk a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, called Flesch’s book a “partisan, argumentative discussion” that “argued on the level of old-time ward politics.”[4] And she persuasively cast doubt on each of the research studies Flesch cited. He had “taken sentences out of context, misrepresented research, and built his case on insufficient evidence,” she said.[5]
In 1967, however, Jeanne Chall, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, looked in much greater detail at studies comparing the phonics approach and whole language. Her book confirmed the value of phonics although she was not dogmatic. “A tenable hypothes,” she wrote,” is that if given time, phonics is advantageous not only for word recognition but also for comprehension—one of the ultimate goals of reading instruction.” [6]
Chall’s conclusion just didn’t take, however. Whole language became even more popular.
My Story—And Yours?
In the 1990s. I was a “mother-listener” in my son’s second-grade classroom in Bozeman, Montana. My (volunteer) job was to listen to children read; usually these were children who had fallen behind. I soon discovered that the children I worked with didn’t know the sounds made by the letters. So I went to the school library and asked if they had some books that linked letters to sounds. “We used to have books like that,” I was told, “but not anymore.”
I ended up ordering a series of books called the Bob Books,”a very effective way of teaching. One of the boys liked them so much that I gave them to him when the school year ended. (I highly recommend them today.)
When I asked my son’s babysitter about phonics—she had recently graduated from college with a degree in education—she said with a smile, “I guess I was absent on the day they taught phonics.”
Phonics Today
Currently, however, phonics is winning the war. In 2024, New York governor Kathy Hochul announced that New York State will start teaching “the science of reading.” Forty states plus the District of Columbia have authorized some form of “science of reading.” Lucy Calkins, a long-time proponent of whole language at Columbia Teachers College, has separated from the college. Her project, the college said in a statement in 2023, “will transition to an Advancing Literacy unit within TC’s Continuing Professional Studies (CPS) division.” The college retracted an earlier statement that her program was “dissolved.” [7]
The impetus for the changing view of phonics may be reading tests. The 2024 “Nation’s Report Card” indicates that 40 percent of 4th graders cannot read at the basic level expected for that grade.[6] However, this figure was the same in 1992!
How can this debate have gone on so long and what does it tell us about history? My view of history tells me that events or situations result from “a complicated tangle of special interests, attractive rhetoric, and, over time, strong personalities . . . in the face of ambiguous laws.” (I wrote that in a post on the history of land-grant colleges.) I am increasingly seeing history as an “unpredictable interplay of self-interested forces,” as I wrote in another post on education. “What is predictable is that multiple interests will interact.”
I’ve run out of space, so I wonder. Is it worth figuring out the interplay of interests that led to the reading wars? Were there self-interested groups? Strong personalities? Did governments play a role? I’ll be thinking about it, and I welcome comment.
Image above shows two phonics-based texts: McGuffey’s Reader and the Bob Books.
Notes (Comments follow the notes.)
[1] Horace Mann, “A Lecture on the Best Mode of Preparing and Using Spelling-books,” delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, August 1841, p. 16 (available through Hathi Trust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009730979).
[2] Mann, 13.
[3]Albert Fishlow, “Levels of Nineteenth-Century American Investment in Education.” Journal of Economic History 26, no. 4 (1966): 418–36, at p. 418, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2115900. See also: Jack Lynch, “Every Man Able to Read: Literacy in Early America,” Colonial Williamsburg, https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/Foundation/journal/Winter11/literacy.cfm.
[4] Janice Schmidt Hobkirk, “Why Johnny Can’t Read: Fact or Fallacy?” Journal of Pediatrics 48, no. 4 (April 1956), 520–529, at 520 (available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022347656800826.)
[5] Hobkirk, 528.
[6] “National Trends and Student Skills,” Nation’s Report Card, https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/national-trends/?grade=4#score-trends.
[7] Jeane S. Chall, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (San Francisco: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 108.
Jane, I so enjoy your essays. I think the argument over reading instruction is politicized, as so much of life is, to the detriment of students. Our youngest began reading on his own at 5 years old-reading signs as we walked down the street. Too young to have either phonics or whole language. The story ends sadly, however. He’s used that gift to become a lawyer! Anyway, thanks for including me on your mailing list, and keep up the good work. Blake
Leo Strauss (Clairmont) would agree with your statement: “I am increasingly seeing history as an “unpredictable interplay of self-interested force.”
On today’s ballot in Wisconsin is a referendum of sorts on reading instruction. The incumbent State Superintendent of Public Instruction opposes phonics instruction and recently lowered the state’s achievement standards (in math as well as reading) so we no longer align with NAEP — but lo and behold, the students are performing so much better than they had been! Challenger Brittany Kinser is an outspoken proponent of phonics. It will be interesting to see at day’s end whether phonics wins.
That’s a good idea, George! Supposedly Horace Mann felt sorry for the children who had to endure so many exercises before being able to read. (Horace Mann was also a major force in creating government-run common schools—when there was no evident need for them.) It does seem strange.
An interesting piece, Jane. The campaign to “improve” reading instruction seems of a piece with so many other “progressive” nostrums for making society better, like central banking, minimum wage laws, government housing plans and many others. Were the enemies of phonics motivated by a genuine belief that people would read better if we changed from a system that was working well and adopted their supposedly better method? Or was there a hidden agenda? I hope you ferret out the truth.