February 13, 2005

Seven Pioneering Adult Literacy Educators in the
History of Teaching Reading With Adults in the United States

Tom Sticht

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the Adult Literacy Research Working Group (ALRWG) in Washington DC, March 10-11, 2005

PROLOGUE

The Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs and her Work
to Teach Slaves and Former Slaves to Read

One of the earliest accounts of teaching an adult to read comes from the work of the slave Harriet A. Jacobs (1813-1897). Even though it was unlawful to teach slaves to read, Jacob’s owner’s daughter taught her to read and write. In 1861, after she became a free woman, Jacobs wrote a book entitled, “Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself” (Jacobs, 1987/1861). In it she tells the story of how she helped an older black man, a slave like her, learn to read. She said, “He thought he could plan to come three times a week without its being suspected. I selected a quiet nook, where no intruder was likely to penetrate, and there I taught him his A, B, C. Considering his age, his progress was astonishing. As soon as he could spell in two syllables he wanted to spell out words in the Bible. … At the end of six months he had read through the New Testament, and could find any text in it.”

Later in her life, after achieving her freedom, Jacobs taught school for former slaves in what were called the Freedmen’s Schools. These schools were set up after the Civil War when the U. S. Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands as the primary agency for reconstruction (Morris, 1981). In the Freedmen’s Schools it was not unusual for both children and their parents to be taught reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic in the same classroom at the same time. This was an early form of “family literacy” education.

Special textbooks were developed for the Freedmen’s Schools that emphasized practical affairs of life and the instilling of positive values. For instance, a lesson from The Freedman’s Second Reader, published by the Boston wing of the American Tract Society in 1865 first presents a list of words for sight reading instruction, but with some attention to phonics (e.g., What letter is silent in hoe?). It shows a drawing of an African-American family gathered around a table listening while the father reads. Beneath the drawing the text says:

“THE FREEDMAN’S HOME
See this home! How neat, how warm,
how full of cheer it looks! It seems as
if the sun shone in there all the day long.
But it takes more than the light of the sun
to make a home bright all the time. Do
you know what it is? It is love. ”