Word: mcguffeys
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...challenging the "look-say" method that took over the field beginning 40 years ago. Look-say, best known through the "Dick and Jane" readers, counts on sight identification of whole words, using pictures as clues, and brings in phonetics only gradually. The new method, without being a throwback to McGuffey, is centered on phonetics, freely uses picture clues and-most significantly-puts to work on a broad scale the theory of programmed learning...
...could make the familiar small change of language chink and chime into high melody. His verse often seemed as easy to read as McGuffey's Reader, but it contained universalities that obscure symbolists rarely attempt. In a time when despair is popular. Frost was grimly, gallantly optimistic. He saw man as a rider, "Mounted bareback on the earth ... his small fist buried in the bushy hide": But though it runs unbridled...
Stories with Guts. Most school boards, even if they wanted McGuffey's Readers, would have supposed them out of print; the Twin Lakes men discovered that American Book Co. began to reprint them in the '20s to the order of Henry Ford, who regarded them as admirable curios -with their antiquated typography and illustrations-to send to his friends. Beula & Co. found the old readers to be just the ticket: McGuffey gives a firm phonetic grounding and follows up with stories that bug a child's eyes out. Kids can read of a Cruel Boy who pulled...
Antiquated Grammar. Despite these nostalgic credentials, the board's choice of McGuffey's touched off a row that last week ranged from village hall to statehouse. Incensed that the board would ignore "developments that have been made in reading during the last 50 years," State School Superintendent Angus Rothwell threatened to withhold state aid, which comes to about $10,000. Taxpayers threatened to impeach the school board. Principal Raymond Oestreich attacked the McGuffey's Readers because of "antiquated grammar, misspelled words and poor punctuation." One teacher refused to use it. And state legal advisers, who want...
...concession to these critics, the board agreed to paste brown tape over or tear out such religious passages as the Sermon on the Mount. But outside of that, it would take no guff about McGuffey. Said Beula: "McGuffey teaches the basic morals of Americanism-honor your parents, honesty, love animals." Said Pfeiffer: "McGuffey builds recognition of the heroic, the elevated, the patriotic strength on which our country is based. If we had McGuffey's in our schools we never would have had the defections we had in Korea...