The
Man Who Taught Millions Of Americans To Read Before Being Forgotten
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Washington Post: 5.23 2021 by Jess McHugh
When an Ohio publisher released William
Holmes McGuffey’s school primers in 1836 and 1837, McGuffey was an ancient
languages professor at a rural college.
He quickly became an influential voice
in the 19th-century common school movement, and his McGuffey Readers became
something more: books that educated millions of Americans.
Over the course of the next 100 years,
nearly every president as well as influential figures from Henry Ford to Laura
Ingalls Wilder learned to read from McGuffey’s primers. Yet today, McGuffey is
hardly a household name outside of conservative Christian home-schooling
circles.
McGuffey was a purist — to his
detractors, an extremist — a Calvinist preacher who believed that dancing was a
sin and once expelled so many students that come springtime, there was only one
senior left to graduate.
But McGuffey’s Readers would strike a chord far beyond Oxford, their influence spidering out into a country just beginning to create public school systems. As Americans debated how to educate an expanding number of citizens, McGuffey’s books offered a convenient answer.
The Readers could guide children from
learning the alphabet all the way to high school materials, as each volume
increased in skill level. Just as importantly, with their tales of self-made
men, American revolutionaries and Pilgrims, they served as a conduit for White,
Christian culture. In that way, McGuffey Readers were about much more than
teaching spelling and grammar.
This Calvinist-inflected idea of American identity made its made mark on generations of schoolchildren — McGuffey’s Readers have sold at least 122 million copies — and helped found a tradition of God in the classroom debated to this day. READ MORE ➤➤
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