American Thinker- In his 1984 book about American education, Samuel Blumenfeld pointed out that “[n]othing has mystified Americans more than the massive decline of literacy in the United States. Children spend more time at school and the government spends more money on education than ever before. Yet, reading ability keeps declining. What has gone wrong?”
You have probably heard this lament. But here’s where it becomes really alarming. Blumenfeld looked back seven decades to the year 1915. That’s when the literacy figures for 1910 were published by the U.S. Bureau of Education and quoted in a weekly publication, School and Society, edited by James McCain Cattelll, one of the luminaries in the Progressive education movement. School and Society stated that:
Statistics compiled by the Bureau of Education for use at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, show that of children from 10 to 14 years of age there were in 1910 only 22 out of every 1,000 who could neither read nor write[.] … The following states report only one child in 1,000 between ages of 10 and 14 as illiterate: Connecticut, District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington[.] … It is evident that the public schools will in a short time practically eliminate illiteracy.
According to the Bureau of Education, U.S. students were at least 99% literate a century ago. Blumenfeld concluded:
So apparently they knew how to teach children to read in 1910. Also, there was no such thing as ‘functional illiteracy,’ that is, a kind of low, inadequate reading ability which is the product of faulty teaching methods in our schools. The illiteracy of 1910 was the result of some children having no schooling. Functional illiteracy is a result of the way we actually teach children to read in our schools, for our teachers today, whether they know it or not, have been deliberately trained to produce functional illiteracy.
Admittedly, these were U.S. government figures presented to the world; maybe chauvinism was at play. But even if you tinker with the stats, the collapse is still catastrophic. The vast majority of children were reading and writing 100 years ago. Now, thanks to deliberate policies of our Education Establishment, we have two thirds testing below proficient. more
During the last half of the 1800’s and first half of the 1900’s, American children were near exclusively taught reading from the “McGuffey Readers” set of books. They taught reading using phonics and used stories that reflected strong moral values. Both of these things apparently worked so well in raising literate, socially responsible children into adults that the “progressives” running public education had to get rid of them as soon as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuffey_Readers
The six volume set can be downloaded free here:
https://www.learn-to-read-prince-george.com/McGuffey-readers.html
And they can be purchased here for anyone interested.
https://www.amazon.com/McGuffeys-Eclectic-Readers-Through-Revised/dp/0471294284
Another great beginning reader book is “The New England Primer” which was the first text book published in America used from the mid 1700’s into the 1900’s by many elementary schools. It used Biblical passages in the text which is likely why it is never heard of today.
https://www.amazon.com/New-England-Primer-David-Barton/dp/092527917X/ref=pd_sim_14_10?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=092527917X&pd_rd_r=VB0C0DKS2S8YSYXP677F&pd_rd_w=Q5VNX&pd_rd_wg=gAULw&psc=1&refRID=VB0C0DKS2S8YSYXP677F
In the early days of what would become America, the prevailing view was that the main reason people needed to be able to read was so they could read the Bible. And it had only been 100 years or so that the Bible had actually been translated into English. The putrid, moral rot that characterizes western culture today can be traced directly back to when leftists took over public education and gradually removed the true foundation of morality (God and the Bible) from public education. By design, children that can’t read can’t know much about the Bible or the lessons taught in it.
All of my kids and now grandkids learned to read before first grade. At home.
With so many illiterate adults in this country, how were they all able to vote for Hillary in 2016?
^ That was me. Damn, can’t we get this fixed?
Tony R –
MJA politely said they’d have a guy looking at it in the morning.
I can read and write as well as I do because my mom and a teacher took the time to teach me how to read and write phonetically when I was in 2nd grade back in the early 60’s. The look say Dick and Jane crap didn’t do me a damned bit of good. That is one of my biggest pet peeves, that and not allowing boys to be boys which contributed to the brilliant, idiot school psychologists (I’m being sarcastic) saying I had ADD when I was in 7th grade. I guess that they the authorities just don’t want people to be able to think for themselves and want to keep as many people as possible to be functionally illiterate or worse in order to control them and how they live their lives. I also have way too many books, my oldest daughter thinks I’m a packrat as I very rarely will get rid of any of my books.
And I’m currently rereading The Birth Of The Modern by Paul Johnson, one of my all time favorite historians.
Get your progeny out of “public” education. It has been soured. Nothing good can grow from soured ground.
I think the educational goombahs pushed sight words and whole English because they needed to come up with something to justify their jobs. But at one of the first back-to-school nights, all of my kids’ teachers admitted they taught phonics because that was what worked. And they would admit teaching phonics in the same tone of whispery voice that they would use if they admitted to selling crack to your second grader.
Dr. Seuss also made it enjoyable for kids to learn to read back then, and he still does to this day. Green Eggs and Spam are classics as well as One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish etc. (I could probably recite them from memory if I really wanted to) that will endure forever, look say won’t. Dick and Jane were torture and pure misery and child abuse. And dare I say retarded since that’s what they did to kids learning to read that way.
And John Dewey, one of the fathers of progressive education (there’s that damned word progressive again) can go to hell as well. Remember kiddies, progressive always means regressive when a progtard says it.
In going thru all my dad’s stuff since he died I came across a Book of the month club edition of Witness by Whittaker Chambers from 1953 in very good condition, dust cover and all in a box of books that has probably been there for over 60 + years. Who knew. Even though I have a later edition of Witness this one I’m keeping because it belonged to and was read by my dad back in the 50’s.
One of my kids learned to read by sounding out the letters before kindergarten. He thought he’d invented the method himself! We read many small wholesome books to him at bedtime and often followed along with our fingers and we did not need advanced teaching degrees to figure this out. I instinctively knew the public schools probably could not do a good job. The days are often a mishmash of activities and behavior disruptions–this from being a room mom and substitue teacher.
My friend’s son was reading at a 5th grade level in High School. He was put into a special class just for reading and discovered his love of books. He was tested 6 months later and was reading at college level.
His problem? He said that the classes he was in all through Middle and High School were free-for-alls. The teacher would be talking and the kids were acting up and making a ruckus. Teachers never did anything to stop it. If they sent the unruly kids to the office, they sent them back.
It’s the school administration and the blame is shared by the state DOE and federal DOE.
^^^ That was me.
We had a library down the street, I was there every week checking out books for the coming week. We were not allowed to watch TV.
As a kid, I enjoyed reading the World Book Encyclopedia for fun. We had the 1968 edition and then upgraded to the 1972 edition, which I still have.
I also own approximately 80% of all the National Geographic issued from the early 1920’s through the mid 2000’s.
Sigh….my mom was sadly one of those oppressed stay-at-home females that constantly read to me and actually was NOT opposed to me being outside (gasp) for hours and hours without telling her where I was going……..
I never noticed the name thing because I’ve had to fill mine in every time for the last few years. Some setting I have in browser security/privacy.
I have a text file on my desktop with my name and email to copy and paste from.
Even has MJA’s Go Fund Me site for putting it in the website line last year.
_________________________
Besides the classics, I kept my nose in an encyclopedia set that was all about Do It Yourself projects. How to build a High Fidelity radio, an addon room, etc.
That was quite a leg up on being useful.
Dadof4: I also have a complete set (12 volumes I think off the top of my head) Popular Mechanics Do It Yourself from 1956. They are red hard back books. 🙂 They are awesome!