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I'd been wanting to post a passage from McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader Revised Edition (1879) for ages now, but it seemed too long for a blog.
Now that I've discovered Blogger's Page feature, I've added a Page called "What people used to be able to read."
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But how many people even made it to high school in 1879? It was a small minority.
But how many people even made it to high school in 1879? It was a small minority.
The question isn't "How many people made it to high school?"...the question is "How much more would your average 8th grader back then have known relative to today?"
Once I got my first child reading, I started her on the McGuffey, Elson, and Canadian Readers. I have her read McGuffey and the Canadian aloud to me and narrate back the events. She has no difficulty comprehending the level of difficulty at the fourth reader (she's seven and was not an early reader).
There are a few important things to remember when reading McGuffeys. First, these passages are much shorter than most of the works our children are expected to read in school. Children do not have perfect stamina reading, and can usually comprehend a more difficult passage that is short much more easily than the same child could plow through A Tale of Two Cities. Second, the Readers increase incrementally in difficulty. This enables the child to tackle slightly more difficult passages each lesson.
I don't know of any basal reader of recent vintage that approaches the quality of typical and common readers prior to, say, 1930. The only exception would be the 1965 Open Court readers.
Can I just say I'm so glad you put that note in there about the sixth reader being high school level?
Just for a minute there I forgot myself and thought it was sixth grade!
Beautiful prose really.
"The question isn't 'How many people made it to high school?'...the question is 'How much more would your average 8th grader back then have known relative to today?'"
Even *this* isn't the correct question. Better is: How much more would your average 14 year old back then have known relative to today?
It is *not* clear to me that the average 14 year old back then (1912) would have known more.
I *do* expect that our "best" kids (think Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology students) would at the least hold their own with their counterparts back then. The children of my boss went to a public high school(*) that offered differential equations. I don't know how common this was in 1912, but I bet it was fairly rare or non-existent.
-Mark Roulo
(*) Just the local district school. No tests to get in ... you just had to live in the neighborhood.
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