A Lesson from McGuffey

 

      When Noah Webster began teaching as a young man during the Revolutionary War, his students used the Bibles from their homes to practice reading.  Anticipating the nationalistic principles that were to underlie his dictionary, Webster wrote a series of "Blue-Backed Spellers," followed by grammars and readers that proved immensely popular for decades [1], superseded only by the publication of the McGuffey’s Readers in 1840 which were to sell even more copies, putting them “in the same category as the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary” [2].  In 1930 the first of editor Zerna Sharp’s readers featuring Dick, Jane, and Sally appeared, putting McGuffey’s in eclipse though the old texts have never gone out of print and continue to sell tens of thousands of copies a year, remaining popular among some homeschoolers [3].  A glance at McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader indicates cultural shifts of the last century and a half, most prominently a loss of focus on the subtleties of the spoken and the written word.

     While each textbook series became progressively less pious, received ideas were regularly promoted over critical thinking.  As textbooks are specifically designed to transmit ideas to a new generation, this is only natural.  Thus McGuffey included such patriotic selections as Joseph Rodman Drake’s “The American Flag” (“Majestic monarch of the cloud!”) [4] and Washington Irving’s encomium on Columbus which describes him as a great and pious “genius” possessing “magnanimity of spirit” who took a benevolent view of America’s indigenous people [5].  “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers” by F. W. P. Greenwood finds “not a single community of men to be compared with them, in the respect of deep religious impressions and an exact performance of moral duty” [6].  These words were doubtless studied in classrooms displaying American flags and portraits of a founding father or two. 

     On the topic of Native Americans, the reader includes an excerpt from a speech by Charles Sprague which declares that America’s aborigines have all “passed away,” Europeans having arrived “bearing the seeds of life and death.”  According to Sprague time has “blotted forever from [the American continent] a whole, peculiar people.”  “As a race, they have withered from the land,” he says, and “read their doom in the setting sun,”  With a sentimental tear, he reflects on a future when they will “be remembered “only in the songs and chronicles of their exterminators” [7].  

     Though the role of religion in education was already beginning its steady decline, McGuffey included a number of religious readings such as “God is Everywhere” by Joseph Hutton, an early nineteenth century poet [8] now obscure, and the Thirty-Seventh Psalm [9].  There are in addition a good many more vaguely spiritual readings, meant for students’ moral improvement.  Many selections required considerable historical background, such as Charles James Fox’s “A Political Pause,” an impassioned fragment from  a polemic about the war with France [10] or the exchange between Walpole and Pitt [11], included more as show-pieces of oratory than for the specific issues involved.

     The verbal sophistication of many literary selections, though, must be for a modern reader the most striking aspect of McGuffey’s book.  Eleven-year-olds were given great chunks of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Thomson, and Cowper as well as American authors like Longfellow, Bryant, and Emerson without simplification or even the explanatory notes an undergraduate textbook would include today.  Children (and even teachers) may not have wholly understood everything they read, but they would certainly improve their reading skills with such challenging selections.  At any rate, all the texts in McGuffey’s are adult literature while in contrast, a survey of novels recommended for sixth graders by teachers’ groups and publishers today reveals that virtually all readings are now written specifically for children.  There are only a very few exceptions.  A Jack London story made one list, and many have highly regarded young adult titles, such as Anne Frank’s diary and works by Judy Blume and Scott O’Dell, but the editors seem to think that writers like Poe, Mark Twain, and de Maupassant would be too difficult or perhaps too irrelevant for today’s students. 

     Declamation, both speech-making and reading literary selections aloud, though virtually absent from today’s curricula, is a significant concern of McGuffey’s.  As a preparation for the readings, the first sixty pages of the book cover viva voce articulation, inflection, accent and emphasis.  Indeed the introductory notes mention “elocutionary value” as one of the standards by which readings were selected.  This is all but the last gasp of the ancient rhetorical rhetorician’s education set forth in Cicero, Quintilian, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium.  As late as the middle twentieth century, many college-bound students enhanced their resumés with Debate Club and Moot Court.  In my high school’s talent show during the early ‘sixties, one boy, a talented actor, thought it appropriate to recite Oliver Wendell Holmes’ comic “One-Hoss Shay,” for his schoolmates.  I doubt that many would consider such a performance today.

     In the nineteenth century the general population read poems aloud in their parlors as a form of home entertainment.  They also relished fine oratory from clergymen and politicians.  In addition they often purchased subscriptions to courses of evening lectures on a variety of topics.  The thrill our ancestors felt at hearing soaring rhetoric is today a specialized taste; more Americans are excited today by watching cars crash through windows in action movies than by verbal pyrotechnics.  Thus leaders’ statements on the news are soundbites rather than speeches and, when readers encounter high-flown language, they are more likely to lose the thread of discourse than to admire the author’s virtuosity.  The pedagogues of writing now stress clarity and brevity at the expense of beauty and emotional force.

     This abandonment of training in speaking or reading aloud marks a major change in the teaching of English.  The aesthetic and affective potential of artful writing is likely to be more prominent in the spoken word, but it has been discounted in favor of the mere delivery of information.  By ignoring writers of the past in favor of those that more directly reflect the lives of the students, educators have abandoned the opportunity to widen readers’ perspectives while incidentally developing their taste.  In a curious way, in verbal art, both spoken and written, thanks to McGuffey my Midwestern ancestors in their one-room schools may have been more sophisticated than today’s teen whose eyes rarely leave his phone.  Having taught English 101 a good many times, I can testify that many students reach college with abysmal verbal skills.  In today’s educational initiatives STEM subjects have an unquestioned lead.  Those who care about the English language might feel a bit nostalgic for the these quaint old readers.   

    

 

 

1.  The speller was published in 1783, a grammar 1784, and a reader in 1785).  The reader was to sell a hundred million copies.  See https://noahwebsterhouse.org/noahwebsterfactsheet/.

2.  These sold 120 million copies. See “William Holmes McGuffey and His Readers,” The Museum Gazette, National Park Service https://web.archive.org/web/20150420113537/https://www.nps.gov/jeff/learn/historyculture/upload/mcguffey.pdf.

3.  Whereas McGuffey’s had taught phonics, The Scott, Foresman Dick, Jane, and Sally books used whole word recognition. 

4.  P. 119.  The author died in 1820 at the age of twenty-fiove.  Antonín Dvořák thought enough of the poem to set it to music.

5.  P. 192.  To Irving he had as well “a poetical temperament,” though he was also “irascible and impetuous.”

6.  P. 223. 

7.  P. 209, from a speech delivered at Boston in observance of the Fourth of July, 1825 titled “The Character and Extirpation of the Indians of New England.”  Charles Ives thought highly enough of his words to set some to music in his 114 Songs.

8.  P. 161.  Hutton was a playwright as well.  The Psalm is on p. 189.

9. P. 67.  Apart from poetry Woodworth wrote operas, plays, hymns, and the first American historical novel The Champions of Freedom, or The Mysterious Chief, A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, Founded on the Events of the War, Between the United States and Great Britain, which Terminated in March, 1815 (1816).  His best-known work, though, is "The Old Oaken Bucket" (1817) which, set to music by George Kiallmark, became a popular song and was recorded in  1899.

10.  P. 102.  The headnote cautions that “his morals were not commendable.” 

11.  P. 151-152.