The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  The instructional materials and methods used in literacy education over the centuries range from the peaks of clarity to the troughs of muddiness, from the miracle of the invention of the phonetic alphabet to the murky depths of literacy test scores. The cultural emphasis has careened between religious and secular; between pretty, engaging texts for the elite, and banal texts for the masses; between individualised, loving instruction by caring, often maternal, tutors, and factory-model instruction driven by cost-efficient bureaucrats. Littering the rocky road to literacy education are piles of discarded teaching materials – which reveal that even the most disarmingly simple texts reflect changing socio-economic priorities and that learning to read is as much of an ideological process as a means of individuation and personal growth. Over time, the value of being literate has decreased from being important enough to save a life to being merely another bean to be counted by bean-counting statisticians.

  At the heart of this chapter is the phonetic alphabet. Though I do not travel from A to Z, from the beginning to the end of literacy education, my chapter starts with – and is structured by – the alphabet.

  A is for Alphabet

  The Christmas Alphabet (1994) by paper engineering artist Robert Sabuda, is a pop-up book. Each letter is printed neatly in a corner of a piece of heavy coloured paper, folded like a Christmas card, to conceal the predominantly white pop-up inside. The blank cover of each card turns the letter on its face into a potential present, a puzzle for readers who instantly become participants in a ‘guess-the-Christmas-image’ game. What does A stand for? ‘Apple’ is not Christmasy enough. A pop-up ‘Angel’ flies whitely out of the card. ‘Tree’ is not, as one might expect, under T, but under E for ‘Evergreen’. And P is ‘Poinsettia’, with ‘Presents’ popping up under G (for ‘Gifts’) and U (for ‘Unwrap’). L, fittingly, is a ‘Letter’ to Santa.2 The Christmas Alphabet is a perfect modern example of the way letters, sounds and images transform magically into symphonies of cultural associations. The process is not as transparent as it looks. Every time we say that ‘A’ is ‘for’ something, we attribute to the letter a meaning beyond a phonetic sound. Each letter stands metonymically for a word and when the word is associated with an image, a little cultural narrative is created, saturating the lessons on learning to read words with lessons on learning to read culture.

  Everyone knows that learning to be literate begins with ABCs. The phrase itself often stands for the beginning of a task. Yet the sheer elegant brilliance of conveying any word by putting together the appropriate combination of just twenty-six letters is so normal, we tend to forget how deeply that invention changed human thought. The Sumerians are credited with the oldest writing systems, dating from around 3500 BCE. These were ideographs, based on the principle that a sign represented an idea. Chinese writing systems still work that way: individual symbols often representing whole words. The Egyptians, beginning around 3000 BCE, used a mix of hieroglyphs and syllabic signs. The first Hebrew alphabet, developed around 1700 BCE, had signs only for consonants, so the Greeks, by including vowels, developed the first completely phonetic alphabet, sometimes called the first technology. With the phonetic alphabet was born the possibility of keeping track of spoken words and so, ultimately, the record keeping, classification systems, abstractions and law-making principles that became the foundations for civilised societies – which depend, of course, on laws, accounting and abstract codes of behaviour. Literacy instruction, however, only became a cultural imperative when, in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, it was linked to the words in holy books – words that outlined the group’s defining beliefs and behaviours. The alphabet made manifest the words of God.

  R is for Religion

  Before the invention of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century, the words attributed to God had to be laboriously hand-written. The first book printed with movable type, tellingly, was a bible printed in Germany by Gutenberg. Once multiple copies of a text could be quickly reproduced mechanically, profound changes to religion became inevitable.

  But the new mechanical printing press soon revealed itself able to do more than spread the word of God. Secular texts started to appear: ballads, gossipy broadsheets and political pamphlets. As the sheer volume of printed material started silting up the world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the cultural landscape changed. The printed text became a fixture of workaday life. There was a change in scale too. The books that had been hand-copied in medieval scriptoria were large, heavy tomes, meant to be read on a table or lectern. The reader was required to come to the book. Because the mechanical press could produce smaller, lighter books more efficiently than scribes, the character of texts in the world changed. Instead of going to books, people could take books with them. Like the internet today, the technology did more than just provide a new medium with which to convey the same message. To adapt Marshall McLuhan’s famous 1964 dictum, the new medium enabled new messages. With the spread of printed texts came the spread of literacy – and the need for effective methods for teaching people to read. Once the two Rs – Reading and Religion – were linked, the need for pedagogical methods and materials to teach reading accelerated, particularly in Jewish, Islamic and, later, Christian cultures. But because mass literacy instruction in English is so entwined with Protestantism that is where the story of ‘R for Religion’ begins.

  For children in late medieval England, learning to read meant learning to read the bible. The first forms of programmed literacy instruction (hornbooks and primers) directly linked reading with religion by printing the sign of the cross before the letter A. The alphabet itself became known as the ‘criss-cross row’ or the ‘Christ-cross-row’, with the cross becoming something of a copyright sign, formally linking the graphemic representation of word sounds with the idea of a holy voice and sacred authorship. For many, learning to read became synonymous with learning to be a Christian.

  As anyone who has attempted to learn a list by heart knows, brute-force repetition is not a particularly enticing, or effective, technique. Yet that was, as John Locke says in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), the ‘ordinary Road’ to literacy education: a straight linear sequence ‘of the Horn-Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible’. As a result, Locke deadpans, it was ‘usually long before learners found any use or pleasure in reading’.3 ‘Pleasurable’ might not seem a particularly apt way to describe the contents of the Puritan New England Primer (1690?), but the book was a significant marker in the history of literacy education because it deliberately engaged the attention of children by using pictures and rhymes as aides-mémoire. The rhyming couplet ‘In Adam’s Fall, / We Sinned All’ made the connection explicit between the story of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge and learning the alphabet. Although the pedagogical principle of enticing children into reading with pictures was not new – Johann Amos Comenius used it to teach Latin in his 1658 Orbis sensualium pictus – the widespread adoption of the New England Primer in colonial America meant that its illustrated rhyming alphabet became standard pedagogical practice, though still associated with sober Christian obedience.

  Islam and Judaism offer other instructive takes on induction into literacy. In Islam, the complete memorisation of all the verses in the Qur’an is regarded as an act of great spiritual significance, a sign of full inclusion into Islam, a rite of passage and a cause for celebration – often with kheer (sweet rice pudding) and baklava (pastry with nuts and honey). The rationale is the wish to ensure that the texts survive – even if the material books that contained the texts don’t. The Qur’an lives as long as there are people who hold its words in their memories.

  In Judaism children are also ‘admitted into the communal memory by way of books’, says Alberto Manguel, and their entrance sweetly celebrated. He describes a medieval initiation rite in which eating letters, eating words, becomes a symbolic entry into Jewish life: a boy was wrapped in a prayer shawl and carried by his father to the teacher who th
en sat the boy on his lap and gave him a slate on which was written ‘the Hebrew alphabet, a passage from the Scriptures and the words “May the Torah be your occupation”’. The teacher read the words, the child repeated them, then ‘the slate was covered with honey and the child licked it, thereby bodily assimilating the holy words’.4

  That sense of the embodied pleasure in learning to read English occurs too, but not until a little later, as an alternative to the ordinary scriptural road. Locke suggested imaginative pleasures (Aesop’s fables) and gambling pleasures (dice with letters pasted on each face), but by the second half of the eighteenth century books had appeared that, if not honey-coated, were at least yummier than previous primers. In The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), Goody teaches children to read by pulling letters made of wood out of her basket: ‘plum-pudding’ is one of the words. Giles Gingerbread, another character from the same period, is taught to read by his father ‘who pulled out of his pocket an alphabet which he made out of gingerbread as he was a gingerbread maker’.5

  C is for Communities

  The idea of taking pleasure from a text is familiar to readers of Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text (1973). He celebrates the bliss (jouissance) of certain kinds of reading. People who grow up to the thrill of being literate understand the pleasure. As a young child in a book-loving family, I remember learning to read The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss while lying on the carpet in our living room under a framed poster by Arthur Szyk that recalled an illuminated manuscript: ‘Books shall be thy companions; book cases and shelves, thy pleasure-nooks and gardens’ (fig. 12). The passage is by the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, doctor and translator, Judah ibn Tibbon, and the words are in English, Hebrew and Yiddish. Even as a young child I recognised that the figures in the poster were oblivious to everything outside their reading. I understood, though could not have expressed it, that reading rewarded concentration. Yet the recognition that some texts reward attention while others do not is a rarely discussed feature in debates about the best methods of induction into a literate community.

  Figure 12. Arthur Szyk, poster for Jewish Book Month.

  In a 1973 essay, Leonard Mendelsohn, English professor and teacher at a Montreal rabbinical college, recounts a lovely story about asking his own six-year-old son to translate from Hebrew to English, extemporaneously, a passage from Genesis for the benefit of a visitor. The child reads the passage and provides a fluent translation – at which point the visitor asks if the boy had perhaps been ‘stealing an occasional glance at the English’ in the bilingual edition that unintentionally had been used. Mendelsohn is embarrassed and asks his son to read the English. The boy ‘stumbled pathetically over the phonics, and with a grimace exclaimed, “I can’t.”’.6 Although Mendelsohn’s little story about the trials and tribulations of translation is sad, the consequences are relatively insignificant. Other stories about the tribulations of translation do not end so happily. A tragic feature of the colonisation of Africa, the Americas, Asia and Australasia centres on the ways Europeans deliberately imposed foreign language and culture on indigenous peoples. In Unsettling Narratives, Australian critic Clare Bradford explains that ‘relations of colonial power were constructed through language’. ‘Colonizers’, she explains, imposed ‘Old World’ names on new landscapes, used language to create zones where none had existed, and used the languages of anthropology and ethnography ‘to objectify and classify colonized peoples’.7

  M is for Mothers and Mentorias

  Typically, the journey to literacy in Western culture moves away from the intimacy of a loving, maternal, domestic space into the cold, communal, patriarchal space of school. An emphasis on maternal pedagogical instruction briefly disrupted this general pattern in the later eighteenth century. Mitzi Myers explains that Georgian women writers ‘fished in a common pool of educational ideas . . . reading motherhood as social opportunity and valorizing heroines as rational educators’.8 Lady Ellenor Fenn, for example, in her cunningly titled Cobwebs to Catch Flies: Dialogues in Short Sentences (1783), recognises the value of enticement and entrapment in winning willing converts to literature. Charlotte the spider used exactly the same tactic to engage Zuckerman and Lurvy in their life-saving conversation about Wilbur. The first commercial primers for children were by women for women teaching children in their care to read. Most famous was Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778–9) which became the model for the published books of instruction that followed. Although books for children had been sized for small hands since the mid eighteenth century, Barbauld is credited with insisting on wide margins and big, clear print. Her books for mothers teaching children to read focus on pleasure, conversation and the happy acquisition of knowledge for living in the world. The very first lesson begins with an invitation to the child Charles ‘to sit in mamma’s lap’. ‘Now read your book’, she continues. Though Barbauld moves in the traditional way from letters to syllables to words, she invites Charles to see these lessons as stepping stones into the world:

  Once papa could not read, nor tell his letters.

  If you learn a little every day you will soon know a great deal.

  Mamma, shall I ever have learned all that there is to be learned?

  No, never, if you were to live longer than the oldest man, but you may learn something every day.9

  The lesson is cosy, inviting, yet extends the idea that reading is not just for little children, but directly linked to a grown-up life. The text, composed in the cadences of everyday speech, holds out the bright future of a lifetime of pleasurable reading. The same sentiments occur repeatedly in the texts by women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Surviving copies of their educational books often provide evidence that teaching children to read was private and personal even if it was conducted using commercially produced texts published in bulk. Some copies show alterations designed for a particular child. Sometimes there are tender inscriptions bridging the gap between a generic commercial publication and a private, domestic gift. Some ‘mentorias’ certainly manufactured their own teaching aids, but once a child had learned to read there would have been little reason to keep the materials. That is why the survival of the little handmade alphabet cards, mobiles and story cards constructed by Jane Johnson (1708–59) for her own children is so rare and astonishing.10

  Although there are relatively few extant examples of the handmade texts that linked maternal teachers and their pupils, there are some records of the pedagogical principles that informed them. One famous eighteenth-century political radical, Mary Wollstonecraft, was deeply committed to the advancement of education. Besides her political tracts and reviews, Wollstonecraft wrote fiction for children, including Original Stories from Real Life (1788). Of her ‘Lessons’, intended for children just learning to read, only a few survive, for Wollstonecraft died before they could be completed. They still ring with the quick spirit of lively conversation between a mother and toddler. In the fourth lesson, for example, Wollstonecraft writes: ‘Drink milk, if you are dry. Play on the floor with the ball. Do not touch the ink; you will black your hands.’11 Even in this brief text, refreshment (drink milk), play (with a ball) and literacy (the reference to the ink) are intimately entwined in an inspired flash of what appears ordinary domestic conversation.

  But Wollstonecraft’s mode of literacy instruction did not become the dominant one. As the necessity of universal literacy became increasingly important through the nineteenth century, the emphasis in reading instruction became more narrowly focused on mechanics, especially when teaching lower-class children. Generally, well into the nineteenth century, reading instruction meant proceeding from letters to syllables to words (conventionally called ‘phonics’ instruction, though more precisely defining the links between the graphemic symbols, the letters, and the phonemic sounds). There were, however, also attempts at instructional methods favouring an introduction to reading via a limited vocabulary of sight words, what we might call the ‘look–say
’ method. In support of that method was ‘Mrs Felix Summerly’, a pseudonym for Marian Fairman Cole, wife of Henry Cole, a prominent Victorian advocate for a new and delicate grace in the graphic design of children’s books. Mrs Summerly’s Mother’s Primer (1844) is a beautiful example. It is printed in blue, red and ochre. In the preface, the author explains that traditional methods of reading instruction were often ‘accomplished at the cost of many tears and much grief to the poor child’ who was ‘scolded for not knowing that the sounds of letters are no guide to the sounds of the words’. Mrs Summerly suggests an alternative:

  My experience with children is that learning to read may be a pleasant instead of a painful task. The child who is made first to learn its alphabet, and then to spell over syllables such as ba, be, bo, &c. often gets a distaste for learning to read, before any reading in fact has been begun. It has appeared to me best to begin reading at once with short easy sentences, even before learning the alphabet perfectly. The child must repeat the words after you, pointing to each one as it is said. Then he may read the words in irregular order: he will soon know them at sight, and will recognize them in other reading lessons.12

  Even though the sentences are short in The Mother’s Primer, the rhythms work and the text makes sense. One early lesson, for example, is ‘To bed I go. / To my bed I do not go’, a perfect glyph on a child’s resistance to the tyranny of bedtime.

  F is for Factory

  Through the nineteenth century, class distinctions in literacy education became more pronounced. The cosy, individualised reading instruction that Anna Barbauld designed for well-loved, financially advantaged children existed in contrast to the growing demand for utilitarian materials that could be used to teach poor children to read, cheaply and quickly.