On the Miss Middleton Effect

It was over a hundred years ago that Miss Middleton’s silent reading comprehension scores and others like them were recorded by the Sycamore, Illinois, Superintendent of Schools Karl Douglas Waldo. Those scores now provide the necessary proof to indict the “reading experts” of his day and of our day for almost destroying America’s freely functioning literacy. Yet those 1913-1914 scores may very well have cost Waldo his job as Superintendent of Schools in Sycamore, Illinois. By January of the very next year, 1915, when Waldo reported his 1913-1914 results in the Elementary School Journal, he was shown instead as Principal of East Aurora High School, Aurora, Illinois. Waldo’s 1913-1914 scores concerned so-called “silent reading comprehension,” which, as will be shown, was unheard of before 1870. Most primary school teachers today would see nothing really wrong with the "silent reading comprehension" lessons or the "silent reading comprehension" tests that took over American schools after the arrival of the reading texts in 1930 that were using a deaf-mute method to teach reading. That circa 1930 take-over happened only sixteen years after Waldo published his 1913-1914 scores. (Of course, those primary school teachers have no idea that they, themselves, are teaching with what is an inferior deaf-mute method whenever they promote context-guessing in reading.) Silent reading comprehension lessons and silent reading comprehension tests were the obvious outgrowths of the deaf-mute, “sentence”, "meaning" reading method that began to be promoted in 1870, over 40 years before Waldo’s tests. No one ever comments on the fact that such silent lessons and silent tests for children with normal hearing were apparently unknown before the 1870 arrival of the sentence version of the deaf-mute method, except in a book, The Mother’s Primer, for both hearing and deaf children. That had been published in 1835 by the famous teacher of deaf children, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, but it was apparently not very widely used. However, Gallaudet did not use the sentence method, so that version was new in 1870. In a speech to the 1873 National Education Association, George L. Farnham reported on his use of what he called the sentence method, which method he later discussed in his 1881 book, The Sentence Method of Teaching Reading. His book was published by C. W. Bardeen of Syracuse, New York, who also published the excellent School Bulletin from 1874 to 1920. In 1870, Farnham had experimented with the sentence method in the schools of Binghamton, New York. A first-grade teacher was to write a whole sentence on the blackboard in front of beginners who could not yet read at all. The teacher was to use silent motions and various articles to enable the children to guess the meaning of the whole written sentence. The rationale for the use of the sentence method was the belief that sentences are totally unbreakable in their meaning and should therefore always be presented to children initially as “wholes”, and only later be broken into their written parts. Yet Farnham did not claim to have originated the idea that reading should always be taught in whole sentences because whole sentences, not isolated words, are the real meaning-bearing units in language. Twenty years after Farnham’s 1870 experiment, in William James’ 1890 The Principles of Psychology, and with no reference to Farnham, James made it clear that he thought that he was the originator of the idea that the sentence is the totally unbreakable and primary unit in thought. Strangely, at the level of the unconscious mind, not the conscious mind, in what the neurologist/surgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield named the automatic sensory-motor mechanism, there is some evidence that syntax, as in a sentence, does automatically control the choice of words and therefore must be the primary unit. For the automatic control of words of grammar in a sentence, see page 22, Two Sides of the Brain, Brain Lateralization Explained, Sid J. Segalowitz, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1983. It appears that James may have been right about the sentence being the unbreakable unit in thought, but that would manifestly be only at the unconscious level, not the conscious level which was being used by Farnham. It is interesting that William James was commissioned in 1878 by the Holt publishers to write his book on psychology, but it did not come out until 1890, many, many years later. James contracted to write his book on psychology some years after he began to teach at Harvard in 1872. That was a year before the sentence method became public with the publishing of Farnham’s 1873 book. However, James was apparently unemployed in 1870 when Farnham gave his lesson on the sentence method in Binghamton. This author’s 1998 book, The Hidden Story, discusses the background on Farnham and James in depth. Since Farnham did NOT claim to have invented the idea that the sentence is the primary unit, Farnham apparently somehow became the agent of the famous and first-in-America psychologist, William James, who did publicly claim, 20 years later, to have invented the idea. One of the very first "silent reading comprehension" tests was written and reported in the 1914 Teachers College Record, Columbia University, New York, by the psychologist, E. L. Thorndike, who had been William James' former student and close friend. In the 1890's, Thorndike had even been permitted to keep his experimental chickens in the basement of William James’ home, while Thorndike was doing graduate work at Harvard under William James. Although others in Thorndike's circle also began working on "silent reading comprehension" tests in 1913-1914, perhaps it was Thorndike's model which won out. The “silent reading comprehension" tests today are only variations of what Thorndike originally prepared. As discussed, in that same 1914 article in which Thorndike reported on his “silent reading comprehension test,” he reported on the oral reading accuracy test of his graduate student, William Scott Gray. It was Gray, 16 years later, who became the author of the first complete deaf-mute method reading series, the famous 1930 “Dick and Jane” readers published by Scott, Foresman, which did away with the use of any isolated “sound” in the teaching of reading. After 1930, for almost 40 years, that “Dick and Jane” series inundated the United States, from Coast to Coast. The two original deaf-mute method readers, the 1930 series published by Scott, Foresman and the 1931 series published by Macmillan, were written by the two most prominent "reading experts" of that time, and both had been Thorndike’s students. William Scott Gray of the University of Chicago was the principal author of the 1930 Scott, Foresman "Dick and Jane" series (which was used in revised forms until the late 1960's). Arthur Irving Gates of Columbia Teachers College was the principal author of the 1931 Macmillan series (later replaced as principal author by Albert J. Harris). Gray and Gates were the “academic” sons of Thorndike, and therefore the “academic” grandsons of William James.