‘Appletons’ School Readers’: An Alternative to Educational Malaise

While literacy rates in America continue to drop, a 19th-century primer series exemplifies the standards that modern textbooks should aim for

Appletons' School Readers were used from the 1880s until the early 20th century.

A little more than a century ago, education in America followed a very different vision than it does today.

A few years back, I encountered a vintage relic in a used bookstore that, for a mere $6, opened my eyes to how much we have lost. “Appletons’ Fifth Reader” is the last volume in a 19th-century textbook series that emphasizes tradition, patriotism, and good taste.

Books that teach the basic elements of reading have a history dating back at least to Martin Luther, who wrote the first primer in the German language during the early days of printing. During much of the colonial period in America, the anonymously authored “The New-England Primer” was used to instill Puritan values in children. After the Civil War, an educational boom brought a demand for new textbooks.

The “Appletons’ School Readers” series was the most successful publishing venture within this competitive market.

Teaching Literary Excellence

Launched in 1877, the series was the brainchild of William T. Harris, a school superintendent in St. Louis, who later rose to become the U.S. commissioner of education, and Andrew J. Rickoff, a superintendent in Cleveland and former president of the National Education Association.

Modeled on the style of the earlier, popular “Eclectic Reader” series by William McGuffey but altered to fit the “melting pot” ideal of the late 19th century, the “Appletons Readers” strove to bring children the best literature in the English-speaking world. They were widely used from the 1880s until the first decades of the 20th century.

While “Appletons’ First Reader” has simple, illustrated lessons for young children that involve identifying letters through sounds and arranging them into words, phrases, and sentences, the content becomes more difficult as the series progresses. The “Second Reader” contains elementary stories and poems; the “Third Reader,” more advanced ones.

The “Fourth Reader” has introductory lessons in logical analysis, as well as excerpts from such classic authors as Herodotus, Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Benjamin Franklin, and Louisa May Alcott. This text would have been studied by a child between the ages of 10 and 12; the equivalent of a fifth or sixth grader. Excerpts are broken up into digestible chunks and followed by questions that test comprehension.

The “Fifth Reader” was meant to be read by adolescents between the ages of about 13 and 15. It contains poetry by Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantics, and Tennyson; excerpts from Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Hawthorne; writings from the Founding Fathers, such as George Washington’s “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior”; and verses from the Book of Psalms. Contributing author Mark Bailey, whose official job title was instructor in elocution at Yale, included his own essays with a classic feel, such as “Intelligent Reading” and “How to Render Noble Ideas,” which is full of advice on public speaking.

Dumbing Things Down

What’s striking is how much more sophisticated these old primers are compared to the mass education textbooks we’re familiar with today. What happened between then and now? The short answer is: John Dewey.

While lecturing on educational reform around the world in the 1920s, the famous pragmatist philosopher visited Soviet Russia, which had overhauled its own pedagogical system following Lenin’s revolution. Dewey was highly impressed with the Marxist methods of indoctrination he had encountered there.

In a 1928 essay published in “The New Republic,” he made excuses for the poverty and persecution that he saw, while also hailing the “population cultivation” in aesthetics and the “nobly heroic” efforts of the “educative struggle.” He espoused that “there is no country in Europe in which the external routine of life is more settled and secure.”

After returning from Soviet Russia, Dewey began promoting his ideas on progressive education inspired by the Soviet model, emphasizing equality in the classroom, learning through doing, and an immersion in the present.

Though Dewey’s observations may strike a modern reader as utterly absurd, he successfully implemented sweeping reforms in public schools based on his principles. A century has now passed, and it’s hard to see the outcome as anything but an unmitigated catastrophe. Dewey’s presentism bias led to a simplification of intellectual content that we continue to see today.

Curricula are built around an ever-changing set of contemporary authors, and it’s increasingly unlikely that students from different graduating classes will have read the same books—while the old stuff gets thrown out, no one can agree on what to replace it with.

This trend worsens the more elite that institutions become. In 2020, the same Yale that once employed Bailey as an instructor of elocution eliminated a survey course in Western art due to diversity concerns. Oxford has proposed to remove Homer and Virgil from its classics program. Ivy League schools no longer even require SAT scores for admission, emphasizing instead an applicant’s community service activities.

Low Numbers of Big Words

Every 10 years, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) conducts an international survey to assess literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills. The OECD defines literacy as “the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written texts.”

According to OECD’s most recent assessment of adult competencies (conducted 10 years ago), more than half of U.S. adults scored in the “below basic” literacy range, reading at lower than an eighth-grade level. Only 12 percent of adults can read at the highest literacy level—which is actually a combination of the two highest groups, as not enough respondents scored at the highest level (2 percent) to make demographic generalizations. The criteria for scoring in the “proficient to high” range involve making complex inferences, applying background knowledge appropriately, interpreting subtle truth claims, and synthesizing information from complex texts.

And yet, though few can read proficiently, everyone is going to college. According to the Census Bureau, almost 38 percent of Americans held a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2021. Is higher education alive and well? Not quite. More than two-thirds of these students graduated with only basic literacy skills. Only a small proportion of the rest can comprehend dense texts of the sort excerpted in “Appletons’ Fifth Reader”—a book once read by nearly every adolescent in America.

A Better Way to Learn

Progressives today take it for granted that they’re more enlightened than all the people who lived before them. Traditional wisdom is backward, they say; the past is full of ignorant racists, and we are better than them. The trends and statistics summarized here, though, expose this judgment for the arrogant fallacy that it is. Despite technological advances, Americans in the 21st century are less enlightened, in many ways, than they were in the 19th.

In our time, Dewey is lionized as a pedagogical genius, while few people remember primer authors such as Harris, Rickoff, or McGuffey. It’s these men, though, rather than Dewey, who deserve our commemoration for helping to elevate the nation’s standards of culture. Their influence can best be seen today in the homeschooling movement.

While “Appletons Readers” and other series like it are long obsolete in the public sphere, they remain popular (and cheap) resources for many parents looking for an alternative to the intellectual and moral stagnation that characterizes mainstream education. A parent could hardly do better for their child’s language development than teaching them literature and traditional values from one of these “archaic” books.