THE FIRST R

IN the office of the superintendent of education in Marin County, Calif., three elementary schoolteachers sat across a table facing four indignant supervisors. The supervisors had just made a horrifying discovery. The teachers had been teaching reading with a system based on pure phonics, and now, far from repenting, they wanted permission to buy a phonic text. As the debate raged back and forth, one supervisor finally blurted out: "But if we approve this book, other people will think we are giving in to Rudolf Flesch."

If 1955 was notable for anything as far as the U.S. public school is concerned, it may be that it will be remembered as the Year of Rudolf Flesch. In his bestselling book Why Johnny Can't Read (TIME, March 14), Flesch baldly accused the U.S. public school of having completely abandoned phonics (the letter-by-letter, syllable-by-syllable method of teaching reading) in favor of the word recognition or look-and-say method (memorizing words as wholes).

As a result, said Flesch. a free-lance writer from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., Johnny is taught merely to guess at words, develops no way to figure out new words he has not already memorized. U.S. educators-closed ranks against Flesch, and when they were not denouncing the "Devil in the Flesch," they were damning the "Flesch peddlers." Nevertheless, though Johnny was marred by flagrant exaggerations, it stayed on the bestseller list for 39 weeks, and thousands of parents--and teachers--found in Flesch the angrily dramatic spokesman they had been waiting for.

Bowl Is Pot. More than 125 newspapers across the nation ran the book as a serial. When the Detroit Free Press published its series, one distraught father wrote in to describe the plight of his son in high school. "They are trying to expel him," he said, "or in some manner rid themselves of him. You know why? Because he cannot read. How in the hell he got as far as loB ... is beyond my means of comprehension." In Louisville, a mother reported on her third-grader's typewriting: "He typed the letters very easily . . . But after typing the letters B-O-W-L across the page about ten times, he called it pot." To such parents, Flesch's book touched a sensitive nerve.

Is the national reading problem as bad as Flesch and some parents think? The answers of the colleges are anything but consistent. Harvard and Wellesley feel that their students read as well as ever.

Yale thinks that its students have never read better. On the other hand, Associate Professor John Jordan of the University of California's English department has noted that half of U. of C.'s applicants regularly flunk the English entrance examination. "If 50% of the top 20% of the high-school graduates cannot pass the test," says he, "it seems to suggest that, for one reason or another, the students are not very well prepared by the public schools."

At Baylor University, E. Hudson Long of the English department says: "Some of our freshmen can't read. They can't spell and they can't learn."

Failures Make News. Actually, almost any attempt to compare Johnny's reading with that of his parents or grandparents is next to meaningless. Since the public school is now committed to keeping its pupils around, no matter how slow they may be, the makeup of the average classroom as well as the intelligence of state university applicants is entirely different from what it was. In the old days, a poor reader would simply drop out of sight. Today, in the mass, he makes headlines.

In spite of the headlines, the experts are now fairly well agreed that they have found the best method to date for teaching reading. It is really a combination of several ways to attack words and sentences, and it includes both word-recognition and phonics. Unfortunately, at a time when good teachers are at a premium, the system demands rare teaching skill. Thus, practice may vary from good to bad, but the theory remains consistent.

If there is one unassailable fact about the present controversy, it is that it is nothing new. True enough, the U.S. was once perfectly willing to leave Johnny chained to the alphabet. The New England Primer taught him his ABCs through little rhymes (e.g., for R: "Rachel doth mourn/ For her first born"). Noah Webster's

American Spelling Book fed him huge doses of phonics, and with their high-toned tales about the perils of sin, Mc-Guffey's Readers did the same. But by the middle of the last century, the educators had already begun to revolt.

In the '80s, educators began applying the now obvious notion that one good way to teach a child to read was first to snag his interest. They produced readers related to a child's own experiences, and in the 20th century, they started to control the number of words to be introduced. They argued about the merits of oral and silent reading; they also began to champion the idea of teaching a pupil to recognize words as wholes. Gradually, word-recognition became the vogue. "There's no doubt about it," says Elementary School Superintendent Oscar M. Chute of Evanston, 111. "Back in the '30s, some educators decided that phonics were no longer useful, so they got rid of phonics."

Allow Me to Institute . . . Phonics is back now, but it is not the center of attraction it once was. Mere word calling, the reading experts insist, is not reading for meaning. It is quite possible, says Mary O'Rourke, senior state supervisor of Massachusetts elementary education, for a little girl to read out institute. "But I have heard that same little girl define it: 'When two people don't know each other, you institute them.' "

The experts believe that at the beginning, a child should learn to recognize new words just as he would recognize a new face. He does not start with an isolated nose and then add a mouth and a couple of ears; at the beginning, he takes in the face as a whole. So, they say, it should be with words. To the beginner, learning that k is named kay and in words is pronounced kuh, that e is a vowel that is sometimes long and sometimes short, and that tie is a syllable that is pronounced tul would be to confuse him hopelessly. Far better at first, say the experts, is simply to teach him kettle--even though he may sometimes call the kettle pot.

Lead Gently. Of all the terms now used by the experts, none takes quite such a beating as "reading readiness." Critics denounce the idea as a nonsensical waste of time; some teachers take it so literally that they simply sit around waiting for their pupils to start reading on their own. By modern theory, a child is not "ready" for printed symbols until he has a mental age of about 6 1/2. Though some children do learn long before by some process of their own, most must be led gently into it. The ideal readiness program is not only supposed to train the child both physically and emotionally for reading; it should also give him a desire for books that will last the rest of his life.

In kindergarten and the first grade, the teacher is supposed to know as much or more about each pupil as the child's mother. She must learn about his interests and his problems, check on whether he can follow directions, see that his sight and hearing are normal, observe how he reacts to his classmates and whether he is overly diffident in "social situations." Of 100 cases of reading disability, Paul Witty once found that 14% had defective vision, 12% were in poor health, 3% had poor hearing. But more important than these physical handicaps were the mental ones: lack of interest (82%), emotional conflicts (42%), unhappy homes (40%).

Lawrence Played Ball. Armed with her innumerable check lists, the modern teacher begins reading instruction not so much with books and pencils as with salamanders, household pets, trips to the zoo and the park. Chicago schools, for instance, have "storytelling" and "tell-and-do" times. Many cities use "experience charts." One San Francisco first grade has a pupilrun "newspaper" which features such headlines as YESTERDAY LAWRENCE PLAYED BALL. The whole idea is to give the children a common experience and then let them dictate a story about it to the teacher. The story appears in the newspaper or on the experience chart, and the children see their own words translated into what otherwise would be meaningless symbols. Whatever devices she uses, the teacher sticks fairly close to her pupils' interest and experiences. She may take them to an airport, says Associate School Superintendent Helen C. Bailey of Philadelphia, and then have them dictate a story about it to her. "This is a kind of commercial to get them interested. We show them the words so they'll want to read." It is also one method of developing a pupil's story sense, of training him to think of a chain of events in proper order. Meanwhile, the teacher also sharpens the eye and the ear. If a student cannot distinguish sounds, if he circles comb when he should have circled cone, he may end up insisting that the President had a hardtack, inviting people to his horse for dinner, and taking his cat along to class when he should have taken a catalogue.

Toy, Boy, Box, Boy. To develop visual discrimination and to get pupils into the habit of reading from left to right, Evanston, 111. schools use strip pictures of horses or dogs all going in that direction. But one horse may be larger than the others; the beginner must be able to pick out which. The child might also have to choose from a series of words (toy, boy, box, boy) the two that are exactly alike; he must then be able to mark a cross above a boy in the picture, or below a table, or beside a house. Gradually, these exercises become more complex. "If the flower has three leaves," a teacher might say of a picture, "draw a ring around the flower. If the flower has two leaves, put a mark on each leaf."

In building up a reading vocabulary, the teacher may encourage pupils to label objects around the room. She may dump a batch of objects into a basket or a box and let the pupils fish them out, naming them as they do. She teaches her children to recognize words by their outlines ([house], [boy], (father"]). She also gets them into the habit of figuring out meanings by how a word is used in a sentence. Pupils begin to see that some of the words in a group begin alike (pony, boy, papa, mamma) and that others end alike (stair, house, father, chair). Finally, they are introduced to a pre-primer and, like as not, to two monotonously tidy little creatures named Dick and Jane.

The world of Dick and Jane is supposed to be like that of any boy and girl. There are, of course, no slums, no arguments, and all of Dick and Jane's friends are polite, pleasant and socially acceptable. "Look, look," says Dick at the beginning of the first primer. "Look up. Look up, up, up." Later on, Jane has a more complicated thought: "I am a duck," she says while walking in the rain. "I can splash like a duck ... I can say quack, quack." The teacher's manual that follows Dick and Jane through their various adventures tells her exactly what sort of questions to ask, what new words have been introduced, and how best to make the pupils remember them. The vocabulary is carefully controlled, and each new word is repeated the right number of times.

Some time in the first grade, the pupils should have a sight-reading vocabulary of 50 to 75 words or more. After that, they are exposed to simple phonics. They still match words, rhyme them, see which begin or end the same. But they also break them down into syllables, learn about such things as the silent e, study the ways of diphthongs and phonograms. When facing any new word, however, they are supposed to try a number of attacks. Phonics is one; configuration and context. clues are others. In a language, say the experts, in which cough does not rhyme with through, ghoti can spell fish (gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in attention), and circumference can be spelled phonetically thousands of ways, the effectiveness of phonics does seem to have its limitations.

Knottiest Problem. By the end of his first-reader period, a child should have a reading vocabulary of 400 to 600 sight words; by the end of the sixth, 7,200 to 8,500. But some will have more and some many less, and this brings the teacher hard up against one of the knottiest problems in modern education. "I was in one rural school," says Superintendent Paul West of Fulton County, Ga.. "where there were 17 children in one class with IQs ranging from 48 to 152." Reading ability varies accordingly. In 1944, St. Louis found that of its 7,380 eighth-graders, 138 read below fourth-grade level, 353 at fourth, 3,439 below eighth and 2,909 above. The big question: How can a teacher cope with so many different levels?

Since automatic promotion is pretty much the rule, many classes are divided into fast and slow groups. The bright use the same primers as the slow, but they are encouraged to supplement their reading with other books. At the third grade, says Assistant Superintendent William Kottmeyer of St. Louis, comes "the great divide." After that, the slow and the bright get the same texts in arithmetic, geography and history. Unless a school system has a most elaborate remedial reading program, the whole class could well be held to the pace of the slow.

Each at His Own Level. Ideally, say the experts, every teacher, no matter what his subject, should be "a teacher of reading." Furthermore, reading instruction should never stop. In St. Louis, it continues from grade school (600 minutes a week) through high school (225 minutes). For slow elementary pupils there are "rooms of 20," where pupils get individual instruction from reading experts. In Evanston, 111., sixth-graders make up "reading wheels," with the spokes representing various books read. Eighth-graders must report on a book a week. But in all reading, the experts insist, each Johnny should proceed at his own level. For the 15-year-old who can only manage fourth-grade books, such classics as Ben Hur and The Count of Monte Cristo have been simplified accordingly.

By the fourth grade, students absorb the alphabet and are taught how to use the dictionary--a technique which the jargon-prone experts call a "location skill." They are also taught to vary the pace of their reading and even to know when to skim. "Far too many children and adults," says Arthur I. Gates of Columbia University's Teachers College, "have habituated one speed of reading which they use on all materials and for all purposes."

Fixations & Regressions. All in all, the teaching of reading has become perhaps the most delicate of all the tasks the school must handle. And each year the experts produce more monographs and pile up study after study. They have measured perception span, eye fixations and regressions. They have tried to determine just how much light a reader should have (20 to 50 foot-candles for close, prolonged reading), the best possible size of primer type (18 pt.) and even the proper length for each primer line (under four inches). At times, such research only adds to the confusion. One investigator estimated that a first-grader's speaking vocabulary averages 2,500 words. Then along came Psychologist Robert Seashore to up the figure to 24,000. With so much material to cover and with so many contradictions, it is no wonder that some teachers throw up their hands in despair. Parents do not always help matters. Too often a child's progress in reading becomes a sort of obsession. "If he learns to read well," says Professor Gates, "all is well. If he does not, he is a failure or a dullard, or both." In a surprising number of cases, the source of all the trouble may be the obsessed parent himself. In Baltimore, for instance, a 13-year-old boy entered the city's remedial-reading program with a reading ability of age seven. Reason: since his widowed mother had to work, he had been raised mostly by a stone-deaf grandmother who rarely spoke to him and was afraid to let him outside to play. As a result, he never became accustomed to hearing new words. Another boy of eleven was brought up by parents who never allowed him to converse at table ("We make the boy keep his place"). Gradually, he ceased to listen to what adults said. He learned no new words and no new ideas.

Why All the Fuss? With proper facilities, properly trained teachers and a less bland variety of reader, the experts think that the normal child will read better and better. Only 3% of U.S. children are unable to go beyond fourth-or fifth-grade level. Why, then, all the fuss? Partly because Johnny's reading is not only fundamental to his future, but also to that of the entire nation. And partly because there will always remain a number of parents and teachers who, often mistaking bad practice for bad theory, will insist that the schools have no alternative but to return to rigid phonics. Examples of that very argument:

P:In suburban Hinsdale (pop. 11,000), 20 miles from Chicago, Mrs. C. Barton Webster flew into a swivet when her eight-year-old son read star for scientist. She began organizing other parents to demand a return to phonics, and the Chicago Tribune backed her up with typically Tribunish indignation. "I've never had such a time," says she. "My phone has been ringing ever since. There are now more than 300 families interested in this fight."

P: In suburban Wheaton, 22 miles west of Chicago, a similar crusade is on. Explains one angry mother: "They teach the beginning and ending consonants of each word well into the first grade--and I mean well into the first grade--and they expect the child to sort out the vowels for himself. I didn't send my child to school to guess at the vowels. I sent him there to be taught the vowels." The mother is now awaiting the school board election next month. "Then," says she, "we're going to lower the boom."

P: Superintendent Charles E. Wingo of Argo, Summit and Bedford Park, 111. uses a system originally started by the late Julie Hay, a longtime Bedford Park schoolteacher. Teacher Hay figured out that 87% of all the syllables in the abridged Webster's dictionary are phonetic. The Hay-Wingo system begins with the short vowel sounds, then the ten most commonly used consonants. After that come the long vowel sounds and the ,rest of the consonants. Within two months, local teachers claim, "the children are unlocking words-on their own."

P:Macon, Ga. and Champaign, 111. have experimented with a phonic system developed by a Texas schoolteacher named Cornelia Sloop. This also starts with vowel sounds, then goes on to consonants, and within a few weeks, to the rules of spelling. Last year Champaign found that while 43.4% of the pupils taught by the standard method scored below the nation al reading level, the score for the Sloop-trained pupils was only 20.7% below.

P:Mason City, Iowa has tried another system. Its inventor: Associate Professor Nadine Fillmore of Coe College. Though Professor Fillmore does not ignore other methods of attacking words, she places a heavy emphasis on phonics. Mason City tested two groups of 17 pupils, found that after one semester, 14 of the 17 taught by the Fillmore method had gained anywhere from three-tenths of a month to four years and four months over their counterparts in a normal class.

P:Garwood, NJ. has tried the Mae Carden system. This ignores pictures, makes pupils use new words and sentences and then break the sentences down into their logical parts. "Garden children," says Mae Garden, "read sentences, not words." The system stresses "functional grammar" with some phonics. All this, according to Inventor Garden, works wonders.

Such evidence, scattered and tentative as it is, may well seem powerful ammunition to the pure-phonics advocates. But the experts could marshal similar test scores and statistics, and they could point out that the phonics experiments have been tried only in small and select school systems. They could also add with complete justification that whatever system is used, today's schools, committed as they are to giving every boy and girl an education, no matter what his capabilities, are up against a heavier problem than any school system has ever faced before. Out of the controversy, it seems, one thing is sure: Flesch's accusations that the public school has abandoned phonics and that before it did, the U.S. had no reading problem, are as ill-founded as his claims that other countries use only phonics and have no reading difficulties.

To U.S. experts, there is no single way to teach reading, nor is there one panacea for the national reading problem. Nor is there much doubt that many Americans will go right on complaining just as they were in 1845, when the Boston Grammar School Committee sadly reported that "a large proportion of the scholars in our first classes, boys and girls of 14 and 15 years of age, when called on to write simple sentences . . . cannot write, without such errors in grammar, in spelling, and in punctuation, as we should blush to see in a letter from a son or daughter of their age."

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