Reading the book yet? Here’s another teaser:
Full literacy wasn’t unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn’t admit students who didn’t know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn’t been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. American experience proved the contrary.1
Think about it. “Reading specialists” throughout our nation’s prisons for kids have a vested interest in making the art of teaching reading as arcane and difficult as possible. There are those, however, who have had universal success with a program that essentially lets kids teach themselves.
Storm the “bastilles’ of public education! Rescue the children! Save our future as a nation!
Those are not too strong. If anything, all those exclamation points are too few, too weak.
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David, your ‘teaser paragraphs’ may be working.
About reading, I have watched my grand children learn to read at home before pre-school. All it takes is parents who care and some appropriate books kept around and ever available.
LomaAlta,
Good on your children and grandchildren.
For many years one of my favorite childhood memories was my mother’s “green chair”. Every evening, all five of us children would gather around her (and on her–*heh*) as she read to us. Books a-plenty were available for us to wander about in. I literally do not remember when I began reading, but I do recall how very, very boring the early grades were because the reading material was so palid, thin, childish (well, through a time when school libraries began to resemble real libraries, you know, those where we sibs could use Mother’s library card to check our real books not found in the “children’s section”).