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publishing industry. Publishing was a business just beginning to reap fantastic profits from
contracts with the new factory schools. Centralized management was proving a pot of gold for
lucky book contractors in big cities. The message was this: "Children should be taught to read
English as if it were Chinese: ideographically."
Huey was even more explicit: he said children learned to read too well and too early and that was
bad for them:
He must not, by reading adult grammatical and logical forms, begin exercises in
mental habits which will violate his childhood.
As Blumenfeld (to whom I owe much of the research cited here) explains, Huey concocted a
novel justification based on Darwinian evolution for jettisoning the alphabet system:
The history of the language in which picture-writing was long the main means
of written communication has here a wealth of suggestions for the framers of
the new primary course. It is not from mere perversity that the boy chalks or
carves his records on a book and desk.... There is here a correspondence with,
if not a direct recapitulation of the life of the race; and we owe it to the child to
encourage his living through the best there is in this pictography stage....
1 Mrs. Anita McCormick Blaine, daughter of the inventor of the harvesting machine, became his patron, purchasing
the College of Education for him with a contribution of $1million.
Dick And Jane
As many before him, Huey missed entirely the brilliant Greek insight that reading and
understanding are two different things. Good reading is the fluent and effortless cracking of the
symbol-sound code which puts understanding within easy reach. Understanding is the translation
of that code into meaning.
It is for many people a natural and fairly harmless mistake. Since they read for meaning, the
code-cracking step is forgotten. Forgotten, that is, by those who read well. For others,
self-disgust and despair engendered by halting progress in decoding sounds sets into play a fatal
chain of circumstances which endangers the relationship to print for a long time, sometimes
wrecking it forever. If decoding is a painful effort, filled with frustrating errors, finally a point is
reached when the reader says, in effect, to the devil with it.
Another piece of dangerous philosophy is concealed inside whole-word practice—the notion that
a piece of writing is only an orange one squeezes in order to extract something called meaning,
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