The McGuffey Readers Taught Reading and Virtue to Millions of Americans

Imagine a first-grade reader in which a child tells a lie, the lie goes badly, and the lesson is printed in plain type so nobody has to hold a seminar to find the moral. Now imagine a modern education school reading that sentence aloud. You can almost hear the committee form.

For about a century, a series of schoolbooks did exactly that. It taught children their letters, their sentences and their sums of character, all in the same volume, and it sold on the order of 120 million copies, a figure so large that historians usually say "estimated" and then lower their voices. Let me tell you the story of the McGuffey Readers, because it explains something about how America used to raise its children and what we gave up when we stopped.

Who was William Holmes McGuffey

A definition first. A "reader" in the nineteenth century was a textbook of graded passages, mostly literature, meant to teach children to read aloud and to understand what they read. It was reading instruction and a literary anthology in one. Whatever else a reader was, it was the book a child carried to school, and often the only book in the house besides the Bible.

William Holmes McGuffey was born in 1800 in western Pennsylvania and grew up on the Ohio frontier, in a family that valued learning and had very little else. He taught school as a young man, studied at Washington College in Pennsylvania, and became a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he taught languages and, later, philosophy. He was also a Presbyterian minister. That matters, because it tells you what kind of man the books came from: a teacher who thought of education as the training of mind and conscience together, and a churchman who believed a free society depended on both.

He did not set out to build an empire. A Cincinnati publisher, Truman and Smith, was looking for a series of readers for the western market, where schools were multiplying faster than the books to fill them, and approached McGuffey about the job. Whatever his methods, the result worked.

The first readers of 1836

The first and second readers appeared in 1836, and the third and fourth followed in 1837. The fifth came in 1844 and the sixth in 1857, both prepared by his brother Alexander rather than by William himself, by which time the series had settled into the form that a generation of children came to know. The books carried the label "Eclectic," because the series drew selections from many writers.

Their appeal rested on a few plain qualities.

First, the graded sequence. A child began with the first reader, a book of simple words and short sentences, and moved up as skill grew. The first reader taught the alphabet and the building of words. The later ones carried longer passages from English and American writers, poetry and oratory, and the sixth reader was an advanced collection meant for students on the edge of adulthood, with selections for elocution. It sounds ordinary now. In the 1830s, when many schools used whatever books the pupils' families happened to own, a coordinated progression was something close to a revolution in method.

Second, price and portability. The books were cheap and sturdy, in an age when a school might have thirty pupils and a handful of books. The little volumes could be passed from the oldest sibling to the youngest and still hold together.

Third, content that children could love. The passages included animal fables, tales of children making good and bad choices, bits of history, poems, and speeches. The prose was plain, the stories short, and the endings pointed.

What the stories taught

Here is what made the Readers a different kind of book. They were not neutral. They announced, repeatedly and without apology, that certain things were good and others were not.

The lessons were the sort a parent of any generation would recognize. Honesty is better than a lie, and a lie will find you out. Work is honorable, and idleness is a poor friend. Kindness to the weak and to animals is a duty. Courage matters most when it costs you something. Obedience to parents and respect for elders are part of growing up. A person who keeps his promises can be trusted with larger things. Cruelty, greed, pride and laziness are shown with their consequences attached.

They also carried a Protestant moral frame. The early editions were full of Scripture references and pious verse, and McGuffey, the Presbyterian minister, saw no contradiction between teaching a child to read and teaching him to fear God. He was not alone. In 1787 the Northwest Ordinance, passed by the same Congress that sent the Constitution to the states, said it plainly: "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The same document that opened the territory where McGuffey grew up wrote the connection between morals and learning into law. See Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause.

Now, a word of honesty for readers who like their history tidy. The Protestant content of the Readers was real, and it is fair to point out that it reflected one tradition in a country of many. Catholic families in the nineteenth century objected to Protestant religious instruction in the public schools, and those objections were not trivial. I'll come back to that, because it is part of how the books changed.

The Readers in frontier and rural schools

Picture a one-room school in Ohio, Indiana or Illinois in the middle of the nineteenth century. The children range from six to sixteen. A single teacher, often a young person only a few years older than the oldest pupil, sits at the front. The pupils bring what books they have, and in a great many of those schools, what they have is McGuffey.

The Readers suited that room well. A graded series let each child work at his own level without the teacher inventing a curriculum from scratch. Reading aloud, a central part of the method, let the teacher hear each pupil and correct him. Memorization and recitation, regular features of school life, drew on the selections. In the evenings the children read to their parents and younger siblings, which carried the school into the home. Literacy in nineteenth-century America was high compared with much of the world, and a common set of books, shared across thousands of small schools, was part of why. I would be careful not to claim the Readers alone produced it. Families, churches, the Bible, newspapers and a general expectation that a free people reads did the larger part of the work. But the Readers were the instrument many children held in their hands.

They also did something subtler. Children from different towns, different backgrounds and even different parts of the country read the same stories. A boy in Ohio and a girl in Iowa might both know the same poem and the same tale. That gave a sprawling, mobile, immigrant-filled republic a small stock of common references. I'd argue it is one of the quiet reasons a country of strangers cohered.

How later editions changed

The Readers did not stay still. McGuffey himself left the work to others over time. He died in 1873, and revisions continued. A major revision came in 1879, and others followed in the early twentieth century.

What changed? In general, later editions drifted toward a more general moral tone and away from the explicit denominational and scriptural material. The sectarian flavor was softened, part of a larger trend in American public schooling as the country grew more diverse and as school systems, answering to taxpayers of many faiths, grew wary of anything that looked like sectarian instruction. Selections were updated, the vocabulary eased, and the books lost some of the hard edge of the early editions. By the early twentieth century they were competing with newer series that were more heavily illustrated, built on new theories of reading instruction, and written by professional educators rather than a minister-professor. Modern readers that emphasized "sight words" and a changing set of pedagogical fashions pushed the older style aside. You can read a good account of one of those fashions in The Reading Wars, How Whole Language Lost a Generation and Phonics Won Back.

The popularity of the old books did not vanish. Henry Ford was a great admirer. In the twentieth century he had the older editions reprinted and gave sets to schools, and he had McGuffey's birthplace cabin moved to Greenfield Village, his museum in Michigan. Reprints continued over the decades, bought by homeschooling families and by teachers who wanted something with a firmer spine. In short, the Readers lost the schoolhouse but never lost the audience.

What was lost, and what was not

Here is the argument I'd like to put in order, because it is the real point of this column.

1. Reading instruction and moral formation were never separate. Every reading book teaches something. A book with no moral lesson still teaches the lesson that there is none, or that the only morals worth mentioning are the ones the author prefers. The question is never whether a reader teaches values. It is which ones, chosen by whom, in the open or not.
2. The old Readers chose their values openly. A parent who opened the book saw exactly what was being taught and could agree or object. That is a form of transparency modern curricula often lack. See Every School Teaches Morals, the Only Question Is Which Ones.
3. Stories teach character in a way lectures do not. A child who has followed a character through temptation, failure and repair has practiced something. This is an old idea, as old as the fable and the parable, and a stronger one than the notion that you can bolt a character-education unit onto a day of unrelated content.
4. A shared stock of stories binds a people. The Readers gave millions of children the same references. A country that has no common reading in its schools has to find its commonality elsewhere.
5. Moral content need not mean sectarian content. Honesty, courage, industry, kindness and fairness are held by people of nearly every faith and of none. A modern reader that taught them without denominational language would have no difficulty meeting the objection that was fair in the nineteenth century.

The strongest objection comes from the other direction, and it deserves an honest hearing. The critics say the Readers were narrow: they reflected the assumptions of the white Protestant Midwest, left out many Americans, and presented a world in which the virtuous prospered and the poor were sometimes blamed for their poverty. There is truth in that. The selections were chosen by one man and his collaborators in one place and time. Some passages now read as preachy, and some of the social attitudes belong to their era.

My answer has three parts. First, the proper response to a limited book is a wider book, not no book. We can include more voices and more stories and keep the habit of teaching character through narrative. Second, every era's readers reflect their editors; the books that replaced McGuffey had assumptions too, which we notice less because they are ours. Third, the Readers' central teaching, that private virtue is the foundation of public freedom, was not the narrow parochial claim. It is the claim John Adams made in 1798 when he wrote that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is a claim as old as Aristotle. A tradition does not stop being true because the first book that carried it had a limited cast.

What a modern reader could borrow

I don't suggest we reissue the 1836 first reader and call it a curriculum. Some of the methods are outdated, and the best evidence on how children learn to read supports systematic phonics, which the early Readers used in simple form, in place of the whole-word guessing that later displaced them. See Is Your Child Being Taught to Read With Phonics? A Parent's Checklist. But the Readers suggest a few things any family or school can use.

• Choose texts with a point of view about character. Pick stories in which characters make choices and live with the results. The best children's literature, then and now, does this.
• Read aloud, and make the children read aloud. Oral reading builds fluency and comprehension, and it gives the adult a window into where the child struggles.
• Memorize some of it. A poem learned by heart in third grade is still there at seventy.
• Use a graded, cumulative sequence. Reading skill builds on itself, and a clear progression beats a scattered pile of materials.
• Tell parents what is in the book. Print the reading list and let families see it. The old Readers had nothing to hide, and a modern curriculum should not either.

The Founding connection

There is a line that runs from the Northwest Ordinance through the one-room school to the McGuffey Readers to the idea of a self-governing people. Washington said in his Farewell Address in 1796 that religion and morality are indispensable supports to political prosperity, and that we should be cautious about supposing morality can be maintained without religion. Jefferson proposed a system of publicly funded schools for Virginia, and the legislature did not adopt it. See Jefferson's Plan to Educate Virginia, and Why the Legislature Said No. Madison argued, in a letter of 1822, that a people who mean to govern themselves must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. The Founders wanted an educated and a moral people, and they thought the two went together.

McGuffey's books were the practical answer to that Founding hope on the frontier. Nobody in Philadelphia designed them. A minister in Ohio, a publisher in Cincinnati and a few million children made them, and they did more for the national character than a good many acts of Congress.

A final thought, from the host's chair

Here is what I find encouraging. The appetite for this kind of book never left. Parents buy reprints. Classical schools build their reading lists around stories of virtue. Microschools and homeschool co-ops put old poems back in the children's hands. People are rediscovering that a reader with a moral spine is not a form of indoctrination but the oldest form of education there is. It trains a child to see that choices have consequences and that some things are worth doing even when nobody is watching.

We lost the books. We did not lose the idea, and ideas, unlike textbooks, do not go out of print.

The case in brief

1. William Holmes McGuffey, a frontier teacher, professor and Presbyterian minister, produced readers beginning in 1836 that came to sell an estimated 120 million copies.
2. They taught reading and character together, in a graded sequence, with stories of honesty, work and courage that children could remember.
3. Later editions softened the explicitly Protestant content, and newer reading series replaced them, though the old books never lost their readers.
4. Every reader teaches values; the honest question is which ones and whether parents can see them, and the old Readers were open about theirs.
5. A modern curriculum could keep the graded sequence, the oral reading and the moral story, widen the cast of voices, and drop the denominational language.

What you can do: Ask your child's teacher for the reading list for the year, read two or three of the selections, and decide what you would add.