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]
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]
When we think of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, we think of the wars following the Protestant Reformation in Europe, especially in the 1500s and 1600s. The United States, we assume, has followed a policy of free expression of religion, as promised in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[1]
Sad to say, that is not true. I would like to share with you (briefly) the story of the “Philadelphia Riots of 1844.” In two episodes in May and July of 1844, pitched battles occurred between two groups: Protestant “nativists” (people, including clergy, who feared foreigners, especially Catholics and their “popery”) and Catholic newcomers, most of them Irish immigrants. As many as 58 people were killed—Protestants, Catholics, and members of the militia that was belatedly sent out to quell the riot. [2]
Historians tend to blame the “nativists” for starting and perpetuating the riots and the Irish crowd for bringing out guns and killing the first victim, setting the stage for retaliation. Continue reading “Riots over the Bible? Yes. In Philadelphia.”
The year 1901 was not a promising time for Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a young black woman, to return to her native North Carolina and teach in a mission school.
White supremacists had overthrown North Carolina’s Fusionist government in 1900. The new governor was proud of the amendment to the state constitution that had “the deliberate purpose of depriving the negro of the right to vote, and of allowing every white man to retain that right.” [1] Schools were separate and unequal in spite of the 1896 Supreme Court decision that said they could be separate if they were equal.
Yet, given that environment, Brown’s experience is not as grim as one would think. Her life is not only inspiring, but it also sheds light on the many people—black and white, from north and south—who tried to help southern blacks. They were unable or unwilling to challenge the power structure, but they went around it.
Brown’s life also illustrates the cross-currents in black education represented by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, both of whom Brown knew.
We’ve all heard that history is written by the winners. In his 1995 book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot both agrees and disagrees. He shows that historical narratives, such as the story of the Haitian Revolution, reflect differences in power—”the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals,” from the initial event to the written word.[1]
In other words, the people who shape history are not necessarily the winners. But they usually have some kind of power.
