First Two Rs

"We are a nation of sixth-grade reading skill. It requires at least seventh-grade reading skill to read newspapers other than the tabloids. ... A recent report of the American Association for Adult Education states that there are 16,000,000 illiterates in the United States--they cannot read beyond the fourth-grade level. . . . Reading failure is a national problem."

So Stella S. Center of New York Uni versity last week told the National Council of Teachers of English meeting in Atlanta. Her complaint was not news to them. They had heard things very like it from parents and most of them knew it was true. Even Harvard has found it necessary to start a course in reading fundamentals for freshmen, each year has to teach nearly 20% of the class how to read its books.

The 3,000 English teachers learned at the convention that many a school had revamped its English curriculum in an attempt at better teaching of reading and writing:

> Instead of Dickens, pupils in some modern schools read Stewart Edward White (The Forty Niners, The Betty Book).

> Instead of beginning with Silas Marner and going on to Shakespeare, a modern high-school English course is likely to start with a study of magazines, then proceed to "units of study" on the U.S. language (what it is, how it changes). Its textbooks include fewer long classics, more anthologies.

> Up-to-date English classes listen to recordings of poetry, stage radio broadcasts, make movies--it all is supposed to help to arouse their interest in learning to read and write. At the convention, delegates watched a model radio broadcast by Atlanta high-school pupils, saw a class at Atlanta's Murphy Junior High School cinemacting.

> Increasingly popular are machines and films that speed up pupils' reading by guiding their eye movements.

The delegates were by no means agreed on the effectiveness of these modern methods. Most caustic was University of South Carolina's 60-year-old Professor Reed Smith, who decried "the neglect of fundamentals." Said he:

"The old principle . . . that you can't sharpen an ax on a velvet grindstone has given place to the view that if the pupils don't like it, they shouldn't be required to do it. ... The underlying assumption seems to be ... that students will write clearly and correctly by some sort of blessed intuition if only the teacher does not depress them with such inconvenient and unprofitable matters as spelling, paragraphing, punctuation, sentence structure, grammar and the choice and order of words. . . ."

If they disagreed on how to teach reading and writing, the English teachers at least agreed on its importance. Said the Council's President Robert Cecil Pooley (University of Wisconsin):

"Wars today are fought not only with weapons but with words. ... At the forefront of this fight stand . . . the guardians of words--our writers, speakers, editors and teachers of speech and English."

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