Number 22
I am teaching, for the first time in years, a freshman composition class, in a small two-year college. The students are mostly working people returning to school, reasonably bright and about average in writing ability. Many don't like to read much, and most probably didn't have heavy scholastic demands made on them in school. I bought a copy of McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader for them to take a look at.
The first copyright date in the reprinted revised edition I bought is 1879, though I've read that McGuffey's Readers first appeared in 1836. They were used for generations in many schoolrooms around the country. I think my parents had them in their one-room grade schools in the hills of West Virginia. Possibly my grandparents read them too, and my great-great-grandparents* could have. The use of McGuffey's Readers declined with John Dewey's influence on educational theory in the early twentieth century.
Books like these would never appear in most classrooms today for at least three reasons: One, they contain some Biblical material and other moral instruction. Two, anything written far in the past or about the past may not be considered "relevant" enough (see PO 8). Three, teachers and parents today usually believe children are incapable of anything more than watered-down, dumbed-down texts built on simple word lists.
Editors of today's textbooks would not include selections from the Bible even as literature, although its language and ideas suffuse even secular writing and thought. McGuffey's contains much that would now be considered offensive (see PO 15).
Students today are notoriously ignorant about even recent history, and geography (ever see Jay Leno's quizzes of people on the street or on college campuses?), and do not understand how it all connects to where they are today.
But I think the strongest objection would be that the text is just too difficult. The Fifth Reader may not have been strictly for the fifth grade. Students sometimes left school to work on the farm, and returned when they could. My mother left school at around 13 to help at home for two or three years, but she wanted to go back to school and did. My father was 21 when he graduated from high school, so I suspect he also stayed at home to work on the farm for a while. But even if the Fifth Reader was used up through high school, few of today's high school students, or graduates, and in fact few American college students would be able to understand some of the material because of the vocabulary (some students have to be told to look up words in a dictionary), syntax, allusions, and ideas. They would hardly know how to begin to figure out a passage such as this:
"If genius be desirable at all, it is only of that great and magnanimous kind, which, like the condor of South America, pitches from the summit of Chimborazo, above the clouds, and sustains itself at pleasure in that empyreal region with an energy rather invigorated than weakened by the effort." (p. 231)
Here we encounter unfamiliar words (empyreal, usually empyrean) and words used in an unfamiliar way (magnanimous, pitches); moral context ("genius" or talent versus hard work is the subject of the essay); complex and unusual sentence structure (rather invigorated than weakened, instead of invigorated rather than weakened); and subtle metaphor.
The book's Introductory Matter comprises lessons on how to read aloud effectively: Articulation, Inflections, Accent, Emphasis, Modulation, and Poetic Pauses. Recitation and memorization (now dismissed as "rote memorization") gave students a feel for eloquent and lucid expression. I think that skillful reading aloud of the example sentence would help students understand its syntax and even its punctuation.
A junior high school teacher at a school my son attended eliminated a book by Charles Dickens from the syllabus because she thought it was too hard, substituting some popular new children's novelist, but Dickens is in the Fifth Reader. The book also has a selection from Hamlet, poems by well known** writers, an essay on the passenger pigeon by Audubon, humor, a few woodcuts, and much more.
This is not to say that McGuffey's Readers should have stopped adding new material in 1920 (the latest copyright in my book). It was time to add modern writers, more women, non-whites, controversial*** ideas, even translations of foreign writers. But there was no need to dumb down textbooks as far as they have been. The assigned book in my class spends (or wastes) the beginning chapters showing how two putative students constructed and revised their essays. One writing sample is by a girl who wants her life to be more interesting than her parents' lives, she wants to travel and so on, and would prefer an apartment full of plants to a landscaped house in the suburbs; the title is "Life in Full Color". In the other sample essay, a girl describes in detail her compulsive eating habit. Both are a bit whiny, especially taken together. Neither refers to either genius or application.
No student raised on McGuffey's Readers would have to be taught in college about the introduction, body, and conclusion of an essay. I doubt that it would be necessary to explain to a McGuffey's student how to select and narrow a topic, develop it with details, and logically make a point. (And readers of McGuffey's would understand the concept of gluttony better than food addiction.) I think most of my students recognized that their textbooks had been much easier than McGuffey's, and I think they appreciated hearing that they could understand difficult material if they applied themselves. But now it's time for them to educate themselves.
I intend to buy the complete set of McGuffey's.
Usually I turn off the grammar checker, but now it's on and it underlined the words that I've indicated with asterisks. (When I inserted asterisks, the green underlining that indicates a grammar question went away in the latter two examples.)
* What's wrong with "great-great-grandparents"? If I remove one or both of the hyphens, Word says it's misspelled.
** I know what it wants with "well known" ~ a hyphen. Modifying pairs preceding a noun are supposed to be hyphenated, if both are adjectives. "Well" is an adverb as well as an adjective, so I omit the unnecessary hyphen; the meaning is clear, unlike the famous example of "high school students" ~ are they school students who are high, or is it the school that's high? The authors mentioned may have been well when they were alive, but "well known" is common enough not to be confusing.
*** "Controversial" is mysteriously a problem.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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