“After half a century of [progressive reform and expanding public education],” wrote Jacques Barzun in Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today, “we who run businesses, carry on professions, work for the government, or engage in teaching itself are forced to admit that illiteracy is still with us” (xii-xiii).
This was published in 1961, and the cause of illiteracy Barzun confronts may sound familiar to those of us in the 2020s: “the loss of the proper pedagogy in the lower schools…, the goal of seeing whole words instead of letters” (p. xiii).
Barzun pleads, “the citizen who is interested (and who has managed to learn to read) [may have their] hair [stand] on end at hearing what folly has been condoned as educational theory during the past thirty years” (p. xiv).
Along with Barzuns dismay about how reading was taught and what passed for “reading theory,” he mused at the end of his Introduction: “Shall we need another book like the present one, fifty years hence, about the misdeeds of the new simplifiers?” (p. xvi).
Considering Barzun lived to be 102, dying in 2012, he may have had what little hair remained stand on end to watch the reading crisis return in the 1990s (the national meltdown over whole language) and 2000s (the National Reading Panel era). And if he could have just held on a bit longer, the current “science of reading” (SOR) onslaught that takes its playbook from the very volume that includes Barzun’s hand wringing now some 60-plus years ago.
Despite the authors’ lamentations in this volume (along with others in the 1950s and 1960s that held forth again progressive education and whole word reading instruction), neither the US nor the world collapsed due to misguided reading instruction or theory.
Shouting “reading crisis!” has proven to be more hobby that credible pronouncement, and ironically, if folks would find the time to read a bit (I recommend this book, b the way), it doesn’t take long to see the arguments as mostly nonsense and wild overreactions grounded in ideologies.
Let me show you a few examples beyond Barzun’s smug and sensationalistic Introduction.
Chapter I: The Reading Problem in America, Charles Child Walcutt [click for a selection of screen shots]
Walcutt, editor of the volume and also author of Chapter VII, offers and opening chapter that takes a full swing at announcing a reading crisis as well as casting plenty of blame. Much of the chapter should sound eerie similar to those familiar with Emily Hanford’s journalism and podcast, patterns that pervade the entire volume.
Walcutt starts by showing evidence of claims of a reading crisis (somehow avoiding credible evidence of a reading crisis). This is particularly interesting because of the strong connections made about low literacy, special needs, and what children are suited for higher education and what children should move from high school into the workforce. Of note, Walcutt mentions Samuel Orton (of Orton-Gillingham), but provides no citation, when discussing disability (p. 8)
If nothing else, the certainty exhibited by Walcutt framed against how much of that certainty comes off as deeply misguided, and by today’s standards, offensive and dehumanizing should give all of us pause about our own certainty and blanket claims.
However, note that immediately follow Walcutt’s arguments about low literacy, he immediately shares a single example of a school that excels at teaching reading! Yes, even in the 1960s, there were claims of miracle schools: “In a school of 700 pupils, there are only 20 with reading problems….We cannot stress too positively that fact that in this school every child learns to read independently in the first grade, unless he is mentally retarded [sic] or disabled”—a percentage oddly close to SOR claims that 90, 95, or 96% of students can be proficient readers (pp. 10-11). [Nowhere is terminology such as “independently” defined or linked to how these claims are verified beyond the claims of the school. We also have no demographics on students or how those students compare to a generalized populations of students.]
We should note that these extraordinary claims have no proof, no scientific research—just claims and anecdotes.
Walcutt does launch into a few pages of “facts,” including data mostly grounded in IQ testing. One example is a reference to the 1940s reading crisis based on the draft for WWII; note that this reading crisis was strongly discredited by literacy scholars as a false attack on progressive education.
Walcutt’s facts also criticize popular commercial reading programs (Macmillan) and associate low literacy with delinquency and low IQ.
Then comes the direct blame, which, again, will sound familiar: “One way to describe the reading problem is to say that it is a teacher problem and —even more—that it is a problem of the teaching of teachers” (p. 18).
And of course: “The assertion that the reading experts do not understand the theory of their system can be demonstrated if we point out the false assumptions, the faulty extrapolations from scientific research, and the absolute contradictions that appear in its central propositions and procedures” (pp. 19-20).
Walcutt then discredits the look-and-say method that he claims dominates reading instruction—although we are left simply to trust that the characterization is both fair and as universally applied as he claims.
Walcutt also traces look-and-say back to Horace Mann, although, again, we must trust this analysis is credible.
Embedded here is a big picture characterization-as-criticism:
This says that reading for meaning has supplanted reading for pronunciation, or even word-recognition, and that some teachers teach only reading for meaning (presumably by whole sentences), ignoring phonics completely on the theory that the child who can read for meaning will pick up his phonics incidentally and without special instruction or effort, but he will read for meaning before he can sound out a word” (p. 31).
In the 1990s, this is the same argument leveled against whole language; today, this is the same argument leveled at balanced literacy.
After Walcutt spends a great deal of time metaphorically discrediting the look-and-say method (an extended bird analogy), he ends melodramatically (but not scientifically): “With this rickety equipment the look-and-say bird has flown for more than thirty years, casting a huge shadow over the lives of our children” (p. 43).
Chapter II: The Nature of Reading Skill, John C. Daniels and Hunter Diack [click for a selection of screen shots]
Daniels and Diack start with exploring different definitions for reading, using another analogy (driving a car). Much of the discussion focuses on concerns about reading through whole word methods, leading to the authors noting their own research on reading errors.
Again, they criticisms seem mostly grounded in disagreements with Dewey and Gestalt psychology. This leads to a discussion of new reading primers, which they criticize as lacking and boring because of efforts to identify and use a necessarily limited number of sight words.
As an artifact of the recurring patterns of the Reading War, this chapter highlights the problems with reading programs and primers grounded in narrow theories and philosophies of reading, but it also demonstrates the complexity of the debates in their final paragraph: “But having said this, we must add that, though the unit of accomplished reading is the word, the phrase, or even the sentence, the unit of learning to read is the letter. These are not two contradictory, conflicting aspects of reading; the one agrees with the other. However, present anxieties about the teaching of reading stem from failures to distinguish between, and indeed actually confusing, these two aspects of the reading process” (p. 67).
Ch. III: Reading Readiness in Theory and Practice, Glenn McCracken [click for a selection of screen shots]
McCracken explains that the New Castle Reading Experiment was published in the book, The Right to Learn, and thus, “Its most important contribution to reading is its proof that the ‘reading readiness’ program is both meaningless and harmful” (p. 71).
This chapter includes a claim that seems common across decades: “Today reading specialists have a long list of reasons why about one third of the public school children can’t read” (p. 80). [Note that despite claims by SOR advocates, NAEP reading scores have been fairly flat with about 30% of students below basic, which is below grade level approximately.]
McCracken represents as well the “poverty is an excuse” faction in the Reading War, arguing: “It is folly to blame poor reading on distracting home influences….Children will learn to read if they are taught to read….If they don’t learn to read it is the fault of the teaching, not the taught” (p. 82).
If fact, McCracken continues, “The reading readiness fad as we have described it here was invented to excuse poor reading instruction by shifting the entire blame to the child….Almost every five-year-old child is ready to learn to read the day he enters school if the reading program is ready for him” (pp. 82, 83).
But, alas, “Reading instructional method in this country is abysmally poor, and blaming the matter on the child is never going to provide any improvement” (p. 84).
Ch. IV: The Whole-Word and Word-Guessing Fallacy, Helen R Lowe [click for a selection of screen shots]
Lowe shares an anecdote about a 28-year-old who holds a high school diploma designated with “Honors”; yet, Arthur cannot read.
Of course, such stories have been highlighted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries; they are tragic but are none the less anecdotes, proving nothing that can be generalized about how children are taught to read.
Lowe, like the other authors in this volume, has an agenda so as is common in all the eras of the Reading War, their are bait-and-switch tactics, never grounded in valid evidence or claims.
Notable, Lowe recognizes that standardized testing of reading can and was gamed to meet the ways students were taught to read; she accuses reading tests focusing on predicting means that “the best predicters are rated the best readers” (p. 103)
The agenda is to attack, you may be surprised, teaching children to guess at words by using pictures: “How can he learn to read words when he is taught to look and think about pictures?” she ponders (p. 104).
Lowe also mentions Orton (in this volume paired with Gallagher, not Gillingham), again without citation.
Ch. V: Reading: A Therapeutic Tool, Hildred Rawson [click for a selection of screen shots]
Rawson’s chapter demonstrates a few key patterns found in today’s Reading War. First is the tension between teaching reading and how to identify students with special needs such as dyslexia.
Rawson argues that “children with reading disorders are not usually referred to us for examination and treatment until they reach the third grade” because of the look-and-say curriculum.
However, “Children…who have been taught for the first grade…to sound out words—that is, by the phonetic method—approach reading differently. They do not need picture clues” (p. 132).
She calls for phonics-first instruction, and no guessing using pictures, to prevent dyslexia, in fact.
[Ch. VI deals with the claimed link between reading “retardation [sic]” and delinquency.]
Ch. VII: Phonics Systems—Proved and Available, Charles Child Walcutt [click for a selection of screen shots]
Walcutt returns and offers the anchor chapter with the stunning opening line: “We have said that no further ‘research’ into methods of reading instruction is necessary” (p. 141).
The chapter is dedicated to an overview of phonics-based reading programs that, he claims, show that reading research is settled—in 1961.
So here you have essentially the exact same arguments made in 1961 that are being used in the SOR movement.
This is basically a silly book, filled with anecdotes and overstatements. But the SOR movement is no less silly, no less bombastic, and no less futile.
We persist with the same arguments getting us nowhere.
Maybe the problem is the arguments, the silly adult bickering.
Actually, there is no “maybe.”
Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today, by Walcutt, Charles Child [click title for access through Internet Archive]
You can access screenshots HERE.
NCTE 2025 Individual Presentation: Recovering Our Reading Dream from a Long Crisis Nightmare
11/21/2025 – 2:45 – 3:15, Mile High Ballroom 1A/1B
Access a PDF of presentation HERE
In 1961, Jacques Barzun in Tomorrow’s Illiterates declared “illiteracy is still with us.” Charles Child Walcutt added: “[N]o further ‘research’ into methods of reading instruction is necessary.” This session examines reading crisis/reform cycles to reconsider the stories told about reading and offer a new approach for reform that serves the needs of students and supports teacher professionalism.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 