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"No New Words." The reason for such limitations is the U.S. dogma of "vocabulary control"—holding down each reader to only a few new words. The rules are often "downright exquisite," says Trace. Widely used readers boast that "no new words" appear for 100 pages or more; the old words are endlessly repeated; the stories are inevitably dull. "Insipid, trivial, inane, pointless," Trace calls them.
At this point. Trace's critique meshes precisely with another new report by seven indignant American, British and Canadian reading experts. Tomorrow's Illiterates (Little, Brown; $3.95) is edited by English Professor Charles C. Walcutt of New York City's Queens College. He cites one series of primers as typical of "vocabulary control": at the end of first grade, after using four books, the child learns 235 words, endlessly repeated in 7,257 words of text.
Seeking the origins of See-Spot-run, Walcutt finds them in an understandable reaction against 19th century U.S. primers. Children then gasped through sentences such as: "The multiplicity of considerations subsumed under the intransigeant prognostications of enthusiasm is considerable." In 1838 Reformer Horace Mann protested: "More than eleven-twelfths of all children in the reading classes of our schools do not understand the meanings of the words they read."
Y Is for Monkey. Yet the children could pronounce and spell those incomprehensible words. Using phonics, they had learned to build from letters to words. The reforms, cresting in the 1930s, played down the meaning of letters and played up the meaning of words. The result was the "look-say" and "whole-word" methods of teaching. Children were supposed to be taught first to "see" words and then break them into letters and syllables, but teachers rarely got around to carrying out the second step effectively.
All sorts of "research" was used to justify the change. The work of such experts as Arthur I. Gates of Columbia's Teachers College seemed to prove that children recognize words by visible "clues." For example, said Gates, the "tail" (or y) at the end of the word denotes monkey to children. Soon children were asked to recognize the "two little eyes" in moon—with logical results. Since letters meant nothing, moon turned into boon, loon or soon. Now, say critics. U.S. children are mired in a whole lexicon of reading errors—bolt for blot, bouquet for banquet, cottage for college, and scores of others.
To avoid these errors, look-say advocates were driven to "vocabulary control" in readers that focus on a few "safe" words. When this worked badly, experts invented "reading readiness" tests, which in effect blame children for being slow. As it stands, "research shows" that a child must attain a "mental age" of precisely 6½ before he is "ready" to read—even if common sense shows that many a child is dying to read at 4½. As a result, charges Critic Walcutt, 75% of U.S. youngsters do not read as well as they could, and "at least 35% of them are seriously retarded."