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]
Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was the most prominent black American at the beginning of the twentieth century. He began and ran the Tuskegee Institute, an innovative industrial school for blacks, which is today Tuskegee University. He dined with President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House—the first time a black man had met with a president in the White House since Frederick Douglass met with Abraham Lincoln. He was a champion of education and moral betterment for all blacks (not just an elite). Thousands of boys were named Booker in his honor.
Washington’s fame declined after his death, however. W.E.B. Du Bois, an intellectual with a Harvard PhD, seems to have taken over the mantle of black leadership, after Washington’s death in 1915—if not before. Du Bois was much younger; he died in 1963.
Today Washington is sometimes disparaged as an “Uncle Tom” because he did not politically resist the growing Jim Crow restrictions of the South.
You’ve probably heard that Henry Ford II resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation because it had veered far away from its donor’s intent. In his 1976 resignation letter, Ford (grandson of Ford Sr.) wrote:
“In effect, the foundation is a creature of capitalism—a statement that, I’m sure, would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of philanthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the. foundation does.
“It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are the beneficiaries of the foundation’s grant programs.”[1]
My last post, “Land Grants or Land Grabs,” revealed that most federal land that started land-grant universities had been taken from Indians. I received some constructive pushback. (See the comments.) But that feedback reminded me of a question, Why did the Europeans invade the New World in the first place and conquer Native Americans, rather than Native Americans invading Europe and conquering Europeans?
The phrasing of this question will alert some readers to the subject of this post, the powerful 1997 book by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.[1]
Diamond’s book travels through time (back to the origins of humans) and space (all continents except Antarctica) to answer that question—to determine why some societies became so powerful, with such technology, that they could cross an ocean and conquer millions of people. The European/Native American conflict is the most obvious example, but history has many examples of more powerful groups overcoming less powerful groups.
You may have seen a statement similar to this one on a university website:
NC State University . . . respectfully acknowledges that the lands within and surrounding present-day Raleigh are the traditional homelands and gathering places of many Indigenous peoples, including eight federally and state-recognized tribes. . . .
Such statements are not purely the result of gracious sentiments. NC State’s acknowledgment and many others were added after a troubling study appeared. It was “Land-Grab Universities,” published in 2020 by High Country News, an environmentally oriented nonprofit newspaper in the West. [1]
I learned about this report from Stephen M. Gavazzi, a professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University and a strong proponent of land-grant universities. In 2020, Dr. Gavazzi had just finished co-editing a book about the land-grants’ “virtuous mission of meeting community challenges and solving society’s problems.”[2]
