June 17, 2026 • 41 mins
Rebecca Smith Pollard published a book of poems to mark the U.S. centennial in 1876, and also a novel with some questionable messages. She also developed a method to teach children to read that was ahead of its time.
Research:
- Chetwynd, Sally Morong “Sam.” “Birth of Rebecca Smith Pollard, Education pioneer – Sept. 20, 1831.” Brass Castle Arts. 9/20/2014. https://brasscastlearts.blogspot.com/2014/09/birth-of-rebecca-smith-pollard.html
- The Writer’s Almanac. “Tuesday, September 20, 2011.” https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2011%252F09%252F20.html
- History of Literacy. “Pollard Nominated to Reading Hall of Fame.” History of Reading News. Vol.XXVI No.1 (2002:Fall). Via Archive.org Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20160729031119/https://historyliteracy.org/scripts/search_display.php?Article_ID=240
- Haefner, Marie. “An American Lady.” The Palimpsest. The State Historical Society of Iowa. April 1957. The Palimpsest archive 38(4), 129-176. doi: https://doi.org/10.17077/0031-0360.22585
- Pollard, Rebecca S. “The Prayers of Eleven Hundred Children.” Our Dumb Animals. Vol. 24, No. 8. January, 1892. https://archive.org/details/sim_animals_our-dumb-animals_1892-01_24_8/
- The Catholic Educational Review. “Phonetics, Their Origin and Function.” Vol. 24. May 1926. https://archive.org/details/sim_catholic-educational-review_1926-05_24/
- “Pollard’s Advanced Speller.” Education. Vol. 18, Issue 1. September 1897. https://archive.org/details/sim_education-us_1897-09_18_1/
- Pollard, R.S. “Educational Appliance.” U.S. Patent No. 375,095. December 20, 1887.
- Heilman, Arthur W. “Principles and practices of teaching reading.” Columbus, Ohio, C. E. Merrill Books. 1961.
- Huey, Edmund Burke. “The History And Pedagogy Of Reading With A Review Of The History Of Reading And Writing And Of Methods Texts And Hygiene In Reading.” The Macmillan Company. 1915.
- “A New Road to Learning.” The Des Moines Register. Page 23. 12/3/1911.
- Wheatley, Jeffrey. “The Wrong Feeling of Feeling Right: Fanaticism and Sentiment in Anti-Abolitionist Novels.” From Religion and Social Change. Edited by Sabrina Danielsen. Journal of Religion and Society. Supplement 26 (2025.)
- Harrington, Kate and Miss M.E. Wilson. “The Moonlight Tryst.” Louisville Journal. 1/7/1854.
- Pollard, Rebecca S. “Emma Bartlett: or, Prejudice and fanaticism.” Cincinnati, Moore, Wilstach, Keys & Overend. 1856.
- “Emma Bartlett: or, Prejudice and Fanaticism.” Ottumwa Semi-Weekly Courier. 4/16/1857.
- Pollard, Rebecca S. “Centennial and Other Poems.” Philadelphia : Lippincott. 1876.
- Kirkham, Samuel. “English Grammar in Familiar Lectures.” New York. Robert B. Collins.
- “Portrait and Biographical Album of Lee County, Iowa.” Chicago: Chapman Brothers, 1887. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~iabiog/lee/pbh1887/pbh1887-s.htm
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Sometime last year, some folks
here at work asked if we had anything planned for
(00:22):
the show to go along with the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that's being celebrated
this year. I think it is safe to say that
there is not a year in which either of us
would really be interested in the kind of like over
the top patriotism and national pride that is usually expected
(00:45):
to go along with that kind of a milestone observance.
We especially were not in the mood for that when
we were asked twenty twenty five. I did, though, go
looking around to see if there was anything that was
kind of more off the beaten path that might spark
my interests and also let us say to the folks
that work, yes, there will be something related on the
(01:07):
calendar our recent episode on Kasimir Pulaski. Unrelated to that conversation.
That is just a coincidence somehow in my search for
something that would let us say, yes, we do have
something on the calendar. I found Rebecca Smith Pollard, who
also published under the name Kate Harrington, and her connection
(01:29):
to the US Simmy Quincentennial is that she published a
book of poems to mark the US Centennial in eighteen
seventy six. That is not much of a connection, and
this episode's also mostly not about that, because Rebecca Smith
Pollard's major influence was not this book of poems that
she published. It was creating a method for teaching children
(01:51):
to read that was really influential in her time and
still has relevance today. She also wrote a novel that
was meant in part as a critical response to Harriet
Beecher Stowe's anti slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, so we're
going to be talking about that as well. Rebecca Harrington
Smith was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, on September twentieth,
(02:14):
eighteen thirty one. Her mother, Marjorie, was born in Ireland
and immigrated to the US with her family when she
was a child. Rebecca's father, Nathaniel Ruggles Smith, was born
in Massachusetts, went to Harvard and then became a teacher,
mostly in private schools. He liked to teach the works
of Shakespeare, and he wrote his own grammar and spelling books.
(02:37):
A grammar textbook by Samuel Kirkham described Nathaniel Ruggles Smith
as a quote distinguished and acute grammarian. Nathaniel also established
and edited a literary journal called the Hesperus, and Rebecca
was their youngest child. Yeah, that literary journal was apparently
one of the first, if not the first literary journals
(02:59):
published west of the Mississippi. It's been a running theme
on the show lately that we don't know much about
people's early lives. But we don't know much about Rebecca's
early life. There's even some uncertainty about her middle name.
A couple of sources I found gave it as Hutchinson
rather than Harrington. I'm not totally sure, but I think
(03:21):
this is because she had an older sister named Rebecca
Hutchinson who only lived for a few months, and that
was the year before this Rebecca was born. At some point,
the Smith family moved west. First they moved to Ohio
and then to Kentucky. Apparently this move is because Marjorie
was ill and they hope that the change of climate
(03:42):
would help her. It's hard to say what impact this
had but from what I was able to piece together.
Marjorie Smith lived until eighteen seventy two, when she died
at the age of eighty four. She outlived Rebecca's father,
who died in eighteen fifty nine at the age of
seventy five. While living in Kentuck, Ucky, Rebecca became a teacher,
and she also started publishing her writing. She published poems
(04:06):
in the Louisville Journal under the name Kate Harrington, often
with a notation of prairie cottage and the year the
poem was written at the end. In eighteen fifty four,
she and another poet, miss M. E. Wilson, of Maysville, Kentucky,
each wrote a poem called Moonlight Tryst that was inscribed
to the other. These were published in the Journal, together
(04:27):
with a note from the editor saying that quote, two
of our romantic young poetesses, living more than one thousand
miles apart, made a covenant to meet in spirit on
a particular night and talk to each other in poetry.
When Kate Harrington didn't submit anything to the paper for
a while, in eighteen fifty five, her next poem appeared
(04:48):
with this note from the editor, quote, we are heartily
glad to see you back. Dear Kate, you must never
play truant so long again. She also published essays in
other newspapers around Kentucky. Sometime in the mid eighteen fifties,
the family moved to Iowa, and in eighteen fifty six
Rebecca published a novel titled Emma Bartlett or Prejudice and Fanaticism.
(05:12):
The title page said that it was by an American lady,
but the copyright statement lists it as the work of R. H. Smith.
In the words of her review and the Ohio Statesman quote,
the heroine, Emma Bartlett, is the offspring of a young
and lively German woman who was driven with her relatives
by political and religious persecution from her own land to
(05:35):
seek a home in America. She illustrates, through a succession
of thrilling scenes, the character of a gentle, noble, and
gifted woman suffering from the evils with which a corrupt
social system and an unwise and unjust prescription have surrounded her.
So as Tracy mentioned at the top of the show,
(05:56):
this book was written at least in part as a
response to Harry at beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin,
which was published in book form in eighteen fifty two
and became a bestseller. Uncle Tom's Cabin, of course, has
its own very complicated legacy. Among other things, it was
straightforwardly anti slavery and as credited with sparking a surge
(06:19):
in abolitionist sentiment in the US, but it also depicted
black people in a very heavily stereotyped way, and Uncle
Tom became an insult to describe Black people who were
perceived as subservient or complicit in their own oppression. At
least thirty novels were written in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin,
(06:40):
which are often grouped together under the umbrella of Anti
Tom literature. At least a third of these novels were
by women, and they were mostly written by writers living
in the South. A lot of Anti Tom novels were
explicitly pro slavery. I did not read this entire book,
(07:01):
but I did read selections from it, and Emma Bartlett
has kind of a broader focus than that. In the
words of a piece in the Weekly Courier of Atumwa, Iowa,
it was quote designed to illustrate the evils of abolitionism
and no nothingism. The review from The Ohio Statesman that
we read from earlier described the book as exposing quote,
(07:24):
political and religious prejudice and fanaticism as seen in Abolitionism,
No Nothingism, and Kindred heresies. Abolitionism was obviously the abolition
of slavery. The No Nothing Party was an anti immigrant
and anti Catholic political party that flourished in the eighteen fifties.
(07:44):
Its name purportedly came from the idea that if members
were asked about any nativist organizations they belonged to, they
would say they knew nothing. Smith does not seem to
have been Catholic herself. Her family were Presbyterians, but she
was sympathetic toward Catholics and opposed to the anti Catholic
prejudice that was widespread in the nineteenth century. Some of
(08:08):
this prejudice was connected to the influx of Catholic immigrants
from Ireland who were fleeing the Great Famine that started
in the eighteen forties. So Smith wrote this novel, too,
exposed No Nothingism as evil, and she apparently thought abolitionism
was just as bad. The books, abolitionist characters are hypocrites
(08:30):
and they have self serving motivations. There are rebuttals against
abolitionist arguments scattered throughout conversations that take place among the
various characters, like at one point, someone describes the idea
of people as property as shocking, and the response is quote,
and yet who first brought them into a position to
(08:51):
be sold as such? Was it not the inhabitants of
that portion of the globe whose descendants are now continually
crying against the sin of slavery? Good gracious. Another conversation
frames accounts of brutality being carried out on southern plantations
as overblown or even fabricated, basically the same kind of
(09:13):
nonsense that still is in Internet comment sections today. We're
not saying that depicting something in a book is the
same as believing or endorsing it. Plenty of writers depict
evil or prejudice or violence in their books without it
being an expression of their own beliefs or tendencies. But
(09:34):
this book was explicitly written for political reasons. It is
dedicated to the quote true upholders of the Constitution and
of the firm supporters of our glorious Union. The preface
to the first edition said that she quote endeavored to
present some facts in fiction just shaking my head. No, oh, Rebecca,
(09:58):
I didn't know any of this when I picked her.
That's what makes it good. That's what makes it a
good thing to discuss. In the introduction to the second
edition of the novel, Smith described it as demonstrating quote
two or three notions which have of late grown to
the importance of political doctrines to be great political and
(10:22):
social evils. The two chief conclusions which she thought these
facts established were that a fellow creature's place of birth
should not be made the test of his capabilities or
intrinsic worth, and that there is neither reason, religion, nor
justice in crushing the white man in order to liberate
(10:42):
the blacks from a bondage in which they have been
placed by circumstances which no ordinary foresight of man and
no ordinary exercise of humanity could have prevented. Once again,
I say, oh, Rebecca. In this book and other writings,
Smith was also so deeply opposed to the idea of
dissolving the Union over the issue of slavery. That's one
(11:06):
of the reasons that she framed abolitionism as a fanatical evil.
She thought that the abolitionists were forcing the country toward
a civil War. Near the end of Emma Bartlett, a
character even recites a five stanza poem that argues stridently
against dissevering the Union. Unfortunately, this book, which was written
(11:28):
when she was twenty five, is the biggest example we
have of Rebecca Smith Pollard's thoughts on this. I looked
through newspapers for other stories or essays or poems that
she might have written later on to see if they
revealed anything in how or whether her opinions might have
evolved during and after the Civil War, and I really
did not find all that much. Her eighteen seventy six
(11:50):
books Centennial and Other Poems does include a dirge for
Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and one
of the founders of the Report publican party. He was
deeply opposed to compromising over the issue of slavery and
the lead up to the Civil War. So this poem
describes Greeley, who was one of the people who worked
(12:12):
to convince Abraham Lincoln to commit to ending slavery with
the Civil War, as a spirit who quote so nobly
endeavored to save from disunion the land of the free.
So does this poem mean that she came to see
slaveholders as the threat to the union rather than abolitionists.
I really cannot say I have theories. See you Friday.
(12:37):
We will get to her work as an educator after
a sponsor break. On April sixth, eighteen fifty eight, Rebecca
Harrington Smith married poet and newspaper editor Oliver I. Taylor.
(12:58):
An announcement of their marriage and The Little Journal described
Rebecca as having achieved considerable eminence in the literary world.
On their wedding anniversary a year later, they welcomed a
daughter named Mary. Sadly, Oliver died of typhoid in eighteen sixty.
Two years later, Rebecca married James Pollard, who was elected
(13:19):
to the Iowa State Senate that year. James had four
children from a previous marriage, and he and Rebecca had
three surviving children together, Adelaide, Eleanor, and Joseph Addison Smith Pollard.
Most written mentions of Joseph refer to him by his
initials JAS. In eighteen seventy, Pollard published a book of
(13:42):
poetry under the name Kate Harrington. It was called In
Memoriam Maymy April sixth, eighteen sixty nine. It was in
memory of her daughter Mary, who died on that date,
which was her tenth birthday and the anniversary of Rebecca's
wedding to Mary's late father. This was a series of
poems that were written for her daughter, but also to
(14:04):
any other mother who had loved and lost a child. Quote,
it matters little what her station proved, or of what nation, race,
or tribe she'd be. I'll place her sympathy beyond all price.
I'll give her confidence and perfect trust. Such friendship true
and strong as never dies, but lives. When lips that pledge,
(14:26):
it turned to dust. Pollard apparently had an ongoing correspondence
with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote to her that this
collection brought tears to his eyes. I found references to
this in writing about Pollard, but I did not find
the actual letter. Pollard's books, Centennial and Other Poems, came
out in eighteen seventy six, also published under the name
(14:48):
Kate Harrington. This collection starts with Iowa's Centennial Poem, which
is a patriotic poem celebrating the American Revolution. Of course,
Iowa was not really part of the Revolution at the time.
What is now Iowa was claimed by Spain and not Britain.
This poem starts out describing Iowa as a barren wild
(15:09):
one hundred years before, home only to indigenous people, who
she refers to as the Red Man. But it goes quote,
we share the nation's glory to by holding to the
world's broadview. Our men of mark are genius, rare, scattered
like sunbeams everywhere. The United States Centennial took place just
(15:30):
a decade after the official end of the Civil War,
so this was near the end of the reconstruction era,
and federal troops were still stationed in South Carolina, Florida,
and Louisiana, so for some people this was a strange
and difficult time to be celebrating a national centennial. The
country still seemed very divided. A lot of ways it
(15:50):
was becoming more divided. This poem alludes to this, calling
for quote prodigal suns to return and to be given
a generous welcome, and to quote give them robes of
a right royal hue. Let the rings that the restore
them be offered by victors who honor the blue. The
poem ends, quote, we ask you to pledge them, truehearted,
(16:14):
a covenant promise anew remembering mong Patriots Departed No Line Parts,
The Gray from the Blue Centennial and other poems. Also
includes poems two and about members of Pollard's family, including
her late daughter, a memorial to William G. Bell Knap,
son of Grant's Secretary of War, William Wurst bell Nap,
(16:36):
a temperance poem, some nature poems, and some poems that
were written by her late father. In addition to writing poetry,
Pollard continued to work as a teacher, mainly at schools
for girls, including in Keokuk, Iowa. That's a school that
she ran from eighteen seventy five to eighteen seventy seven.
It seems like she and her husband, James were separated
(16:59):
by eighteen seven seventy seven, so especially after that, her
teaching and her writing would have been really necessary to
support herself and her children. James died in nineteen oh two.
It seems like Pollard was ahead of her time as
a teacher. Nineteenth century schools often involved a lot of
learning by rote and strict discipline, but she taught hands
(17:20):
on history lessons with her students dressing up and re
enacting battles. She cut up apples to help students learn
about fractions, and she had a classroom garden outside of
the school. Part of the lesson involved pulling up some
of the plants at different stages of their development to
see how they grew. In eighteen eighty seven, Pollard was
awarded a patent under the name R. S. Pollard. This
(17:44):
was for an educational appliance, and here's how the patents
described this invention. Quote two or more plates connected together
and shifting upon or within each other, and having upon
their faces a series of characters, which, upon a proper
shifting of the plate's form, and convey to the eye
and mind different impressions, meanings and objects which singly or
(18:07):
improperly grouped. They do not indicate whereby the mind of
a student is trained by the constructive and synthetic methods
in the formation of objects, characters, and the language. In
one of the accompanying illustrations, one of the plates is
a ring with a series of letters written on it
like S, RP, and M. The other plate is in
(18:30):
the middle and it has the letters A through T.
So by turning that outer ring you can see how
these letters combine to form words sat, rat, pat, and MATT.
Another illustration shows this setup being used for arithmetic. These
devices would be made from blackboard or something else that
could be a RaSE, so that a teacher could prepare
(18:51):
the board to go along with whatever the day's lessons were.
Pollard had started teaching back when she was living with
her parents in Kentucky. At this point, she had at
least two decades of experience as a teacher. She also
had her father's example as a teacher, and she had
decided that teaching children phonics was critical to their learning
(19:12):
to read. This was right in the middle of a
century's long debate in the United States about how best
to teach children to read. The idea of teaching children
through phonics very basically meaning the relationship between letters and
the sounds that they make, goes back to at least
the sixteenth century, when the first formal schools started to
(19:33):
be established in North America. Children were typically taught the
alphabet and the sounds made by each letter. Students put
that into practice by reading the Bible or historic or
political texts. Since there were no text books made specifically
for children until the seventeenth century, I'll just say I
did not look into the history of reading education outside
(19:55):
of the United States. At all for this episode, so
we are not going to be talking about that. Some
of the earliest reading and spelling textbooks in North America
were phonics based. Those included Noah Webster's The American Spelling Book,
also called The Blue Backed Speller, which came out in
seventeen eighty three. He also released A Grammar in seventeen
(20:16):
eighty four and A Reader in seventeen eighty five. We
talked about Webster and his influence more in our two
parter on the Dictionary Wars, which came out in June
of twenty twenty three. In the mid eighteen hundreds, school
started moving away from phonics in favor of a method
that focused on learning whole words, or the look say method.
(20:37):
One advocate of this was Thomas Hopkins Gaaladet, founder of
the first American School for the Deaf and namesake of
Gallaudet University. In his book The Mother's Primer to Teach
Her Child Its Letters, he wrote, quote in the common modes,
what can be more uninteresting than to commence with teaching
a child to call certain arbitrary marks or letters which
(20:59):
in themselves have no meaning, by certain arbitrary sounds or
names of the letters, which also have no meaning. What
an unintelligible and irksome task it must be. So Galiadet's
method paired words with pictures, like a picture of a
cat along with the word cat, so that the student
could learn that whole word rather than its component letters.
(21:23):
This method probably made a lot of sense to Galandet
because of his work with Death and Heart of hearing
students who either couldn't hear the sounds that were made
by different letters and letter combinations, or couldn't hear them
very well. But this method did not provide a way
for students to decode written words that they didn't already know,
other than to try to work it out from context
(21:45):
or maybe from illustrations that might be on the page.
The first books designed for this method also only went
up to the third grade, and by necessity, they were
focused on words for concrete objects and concepts that can
be illustrated, so consequently their vocabulary was kind of limited.
The Mother's Primer was written for the parents of hearing students,
(22:07):
and starting in the eighteen forties, Galliaut's method was popularized
outside of schools for the deaf, in part by educational
reformer Horace Mann. Man advocated teaching children to read by
focusing on whole words and only after that to focus
on the alphabet and spelling. This whole word model was
(22:28):
fiercely debated among educators, but in the later part of
the nineteenth century it gradually became more widely used than
phonics based instruction in the United States. So that brings
us back to Rebecca Smith Pollard in the late eighteen eighties,
so about forty years after Horace mann started popularizing the
look say method, she created a whole system for teaching reading,
(22:52):
including a reader, a speller, and a teacher's manual, and
it was based on phonics, which we will talk more
about after a sponsor break. In eighteen eighty nine, Rebecca
Smith Pollard published her first synthetic reader, synthetic Speller, and
(23:15):
a complete manual Pollard Synthetic Method of Reading and Spelling,
which was a step by step guide for teachers on
how to use the other two books with their students.
She wrote in the preface to the manual, quote, instead
of teaching the word as a whole and afterwards subjecting
it to phonic analysis, is it not infinitely better to
(23:36):
take the sounds of the letters for our starting point,
and with those sounds lay a foundation firm and broad,
upon which we can build whole families of words for
instant recognition. Her method included what she referred to as
busy work, in which children practice sounding out letters or
drew latters that were used to illustrate the progression of
(23:58):
tones that different vowels could make, or drew wheels with
a sound in the center and a spoke for each
word that can be made by adding a letter to
that sound. She described these as families, so for example,
the ot the Aught family included words like pot tot
rot and cot uh. There was a lot of busy work.
(24:19):
Those are just examples, but Pollard also acknowledged the need
to make things fun, incorporating drawing and sketching and singing
to illustrate different concepts. In the preface, she wrote, quote,
why should not something be used to awaken and hold
the interest of children in the drudgery of the first
lessons in reading? Are not splints, balls, toothpicks, clay and
(24:41):
sandwork used for this purpose In teaching the first principles
of arithmetic and geography. Every intelligent teacher knows when the
developing mind of the child no longer needs these devices
or helps in the last names branches, Why should there
be any question as to when the devices of this
method have served their purpose. Pollard's method of teaching phonics
(25:04):
involved focusing on the twenty six letters of the alphabet
and all the different sounds they can be used to represent. Students'
textbooks were illustrated to help students remember sounds associated with
different letters, like r R was shown next to a
growling dog, while H was next to a panting dog.
(25:24):
Stories incorporated the words and sounds that were the focus
of a particular lesson, and these became more advanced over time,
so lesson one in pollard Synthetic first reader focused on
single syllable words that rhymed with hat, can, or bag,
while the first lesson and the second reader is focused
on words ending in ing, as well as talk, walk,
(25:46):
each piece, and square. These textbooks sorted the letters into
vowels and consonants, and then sorted the consonant sounds into
subvocals or voiced consonants, and aspirates or whispers. She also
described sounds as labial, lingual, dental, guttural, and pure aspirate
depending on where in the mouth each sound was formed.
(26:10):
After learning the letters and these sounds, students could move
on to learning combinations of sounds, like digraphs and trigraphs.
Pollard's books also included tables of all the diacritical marks
and the sounds they corresponded to. The busy work included
having students mark their textbooks with diacritical marks corresponding to
(26:31):
the sounds made by each letter in each word. This
was controversial, both because people objected to the idea of
students writing in books and because people thought this busy
work was tedious. Pollard later suggested having students make their
marks on a piece of transparent material, so the book
itself remained unmarked. Pollard did not invent the idea of
(26:55):
teaching phonics, As we said, a lot of the earliest
reading textbooks for children in the United States were phonics
based until the field of teaching had moved toward a
whole word approach. But she was one of the first
to combine spelling and reading books with a teacher's manual
so that everything went together. She also developed literature readers
(27:17):
that became gradually more advanced for children to move on
to after they had mastered the basics. She developed all
of this material over the course of about eight years
with the help of her daughter Adelaide, who had also
become a teacher and also wrote hymns. Pollard's phonics based
reading instruction became really influential in the late nineteenth and
(27:38):
early twentieth centuries. Her system was used all over the country,
and multiple other textbook writers took inspiration from her. A
review of Pollard's Advanced Speller appeared in the journal Education
in eighteen ninety seven. The reviewer wrote, quote, this book
teaches the pupil to spell, which is its great merit.
(27:59):
The need of such book is made painfully evident by
the newspapers, the books, and the business letters that one
reads bad spelling is a fault of our busy her
read American life. The author of this volume has done
much to correct this fault. We believe in her system.
It teaches its students to think as well as to
write and speak correctly. It teaches him to note accurately
(28:23):
the component parts of a word to form a scientific
opinion as to its proper pronunciation. We would like to
have our own children taught by this system, and we
hope to secure the introduction of this book in the
schools attended by them. We commend it to all teachers.
Proponents of Pollard's method included Edward Everett Hale, who was
(28:44):
an advocate of education for the Freed people and of
the Chautauqua adult education movement. In the History and Pedagogy
of reading with the Review of the History of Reading
and Writing and of Methods and Texts and Hygiene in Reading,
which came out in nineteen fifteen, Ian Edmund Burke Hughey
wrote of Pollard's method quote, the main business of the
(29:04):
method is to make the child able to pronounce words
for himself as he comes to them in reading new matter,
and it accomplishes this result pretty effectually. Hue also described
the method as having been worked out with care and completeness,
and as successful at getting children to learn word structure
and word calling, or recognizing and calling out the words,
(29:27):
but he didn't praise Pollard's method across the board. He
also described it as quote intensely artificial and adult in
its conceptions, and destructive of right habits of reading and
of using language generally. He was also of the opinion
that working up from phonetic elements, to words, to ideas,
to sentences as the opposite of how the mind naturally works.
(29:51):
In her later years, Rebecca Smith Pollard wrote a number
of religious hymns, and in eighteen ninety one she wrote
a letter to George t Amas, founder and first president
of the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, noting, quote,
the kindly mention you frequently make of our Catholic friends.
So Pollard, based on the way Angel had written about Catholics,
(30:14):
thought that he might appreciate an experience she'd had while
traveling to train teachers to use her reading methods. That
included visiting a lot of convents to train the nuns
who taught in Catholic schools. She said she had been
dealing with an eye inflammation for some time during one
of these visits, and one of the Catholic mothers told
her not to go to the doctor yet, but that
(30:35):
they would have all eleven hundred children in their schools
pray for her quote what wonder that the shadows lifted,
the clouds dispersed, and that ere the week had ended,
there was not to dim my vision save the grateful
tears which I could not banish when I remembered how
quickly the Loving Savior responded to the children's calls. Pollard's
(30:57):
last published poem was called Althea or the Morning Glory,
and it came out in nineteen twelve, when she was eighty.
Unlike most of her earlier poetry work, she published it
under her own name, Rebecca S. Pollard. It's a long poem,
It's more than thirty pages, and it's a meditation on
faith and mortality with a lot of flower imagery. Rebecca
(31:19):
Smith Pollard lost most of her eyesight toward the end
of her life. She spent the last years of her
life living with her son in Fort Madison, Iowa. She
died there on May twenty ninth, nineteen seventeen, at the
age of eighty five. A poem she had written several
years earlier but had never published, titled Heaven, was read
at her funeral. She was buried at Farmington Cemetery with
(31:42):
a marker that says Rebecca Smith Pollard and then under
that in quotation marks Kate Harrington. Around the time of
Pollard's death, phonics started to fall out of favor again
in the United States, with reading instruction once again moving
back to focus on whole words. In nineteen fifty five,
Rudolph Flesh's book Why Johnny Can't Read criticized the abandonment
(32:05):
of phonics, which led to another resurgence in phonics based instruction.
Then that shifted once again with a move toward whole
language instruction in the nineteen eighties, and then the evolution
of balanced literacy in the nineteen nineties. This back and
forth is sometimes characterized as the reading wars. Uh yeah,
(32:25):
I would say both the back and forth and the
discussion around the back and forth has been characterized as
the reading wars. Balanced literacy has been described as kind
of a happy medium between phonics and whole word instruction,
taking the best parts of each of them, but there
has also been a lot of variation in exactly what's
(32:47):
involved in different methods that have been under this umbrella
of balanced literacy. Some of its critics described balance literacy
as mainly a variation on whole word instruction without enough fun.
Most recently, the idea of three quing that is part
of some balanced literacy systems has come up under really
(33:07):
heavy criticism. Three queuing involves trying to figure out the
meanings of unfamiliar words based on context clues or pictures,
or making a guess based on the sound made by
the first letter, rather than teaching children how to sound
out or decode unfamiliar words. A lot of public interest
(33:28):
and criticism of this followed reporting by Emily Hanford at
American Public Media, and then a podcast that came out
of that reporting called SOULD a story in twenty twenty two. Today,
in the US, there's been a growing movement towards the
science of reading, which bases reading instruction on techniques that
can be backed by scientific evidence of their efficacy. Broadly speaking,
(33:52):
phonics and phonemic awareness are two components of the science
of reading, which also includes multiple other elements like vocabulary
and reading comprehension. Because being able to sound out the
word based on its letters or phonemes is only one
step in the process of understanding what something means. The
Science of Reading isn't a program for reading instruction, though,
(34:14):
it's more of a body of research into reading and
literacy and the use of that research to guide programs
that teach reading. And there is still, of course, a
ton of controversy around exactly how best to implement all
of this research. Yeah, I have seen a number of
discussions among teachers and other people who work in education
(34:35):
who feel like some uh, some systems that are framed
as science of reading, feel like that that's just the
phonics part and not all of this other part that
is also necessary to really being able to read, and
this part being able to figure out what individual words
are if you're not familiar with them, or even if
(34:57):
you are. That is just one component of what is
being described as a literacy crisis in the US. After
I finished this whole outline, like first thing this morning,
I saw an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
that talked about other factors contributing to this literacy crisis,
including smartphones, which the author of this article was like,
(35:20):
I was kind of a naysayer and thinking smartphones were
a problem, but there is a growing body of evidence
that smartphones really are playing a role. Other factors were
early reliance on AI chatbots to try to get information,
and a shift in the way not just like the
reading of words is taught, but once you get into
(35:41):
reading pieces of work, a shift away from reading complete
works to instead trying to get core pieces of information
from very short excerpts so instead of reading the entirety
of a novel, reading a small amount of it and
testing comprehension that small amount, which sort of has left
(36:02):
people getting into high school and college without sort of
the reading stamina to read whole long works and analyze
and follow them. We obviously are not teachers. We do
not have hands on experience with all of this, but
it is clear that there has been a lot of
(36:25):
debate about all of this in recent decades. It's things
that are having a clear impact and how students are
taught and how society functions as people are or are
not able to read and make sense out of information.
So that's Rebecca Smith Pollard ahead of her time in
some ways but not others. Do you want to read
(36:47):
and make sense out of some listener mail? Yes? This
is kind of funny that we're talking about reading comprehension
because I had to ask Collie earlier if she remembered
me reading this email already. We don't think I read
this email ready, but apologies if I have read it twice.
This is from Ellen. Ellen wrote another vote for a
loft codiohearn and wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I started
(37:09):
listening to your podcast when I had a very long
commute to a job was giving me insomnia and panic attacks.
I was working for a very critical supervisor. I'm just
going to skip ahead and say having a really rough time.
And I remember when I read this email the first time.
I got very choked up at the next part, in
which Ellen said, I especially appreciated your Friday blessing when
(37:33):
you tell us all that you hope we have a
RESTful weekend and do something that makes us happy. I
want you to know how meaningful that little kindness was
to me during that time. Now, thankfully I have a
much better job, but still do a lot of driving,
so I often have thoughts Velveteen Rabbit, Philip Glass embroidery.
They have not yet made it into an email, but
when I was listening to the Elizabeth Bisland episode and
(37:56):
heard the name left coddioharn, I thought that name sounds familiar.
As he went on, I remembered I have a book
by him. Back in the early nineteen nineties. My mother
gave me his book Some Chinese Ghosts after I returned
from living in Taiwan for a couple of years. She
knew I was enjoying reading the sort of weird old
books you find in used book sales. This book was
(38:16):
published in eighteen eighty seven, and my copy is a
reprint by the Modern Library from nineteen twenty seven. The
intro to this volume is a short bio of hern
written in such an entertaining and old fashioned style, I
decided to scan it and attach it for you. While
his whole life story is extremely interesting, the book itself
is a pretty rough read. It's full of Chinese transliterations,
(38:38):
Victorian orientalism, and lofty prose. Sounds about right. According to
his bio, this book was typical of his strange genius,
and he considered it quote an attempt in the direction
I hope to make triumph someday poetical prose poorlof Codio.
He was not a very good judge of what people
in the future would like to read. Maybe he would
(38:58):
be a good candidate for a Halloween eppisode because, apparently
quote he gives the reader a ghostly shutter by building
up an intimacy with the unseen. I will pause to
say I have him like as a potential October topic
for that reason. To return to the email. Since Embroidery
was also a recent topic. I'm sending you a photo
of my first needle point project, which I inherited unfinished
(39:20):
from my husband's grandmother. She had started it as a
wedding present for me and had finished about a third
of it when she passed away. I had never done
needle point before, but it was such a beautiful pattern
based on an artwork by Mukha that I decided to
try it. After all, needle point is just one stitch,
how hard can it be? Well? It ended up taking
four years to finish it, as it is quite large,
(39:42):
but since then I've completed several much smaller projects and
even learned to do more than one stitch. As pet tax,
here is a photo of our grand tortoise. He is
a Russian tortoise named Ivan the Turtble. He loves to
go outside and dig in the garden and is fond
of you, snowdrops, dianthus and Petunia's when he can reach them.
(40:03):
Thank you so much for your podcast, and especially for
being your lovely, smart, kind, unique selves. You make me
feel better about the world. Best wishes, Ellen. I want
the email to show me the blocked content. Oh my goodness,
we have a little tortoise out in the yard looking
(40:23):
at what appears to be a small ceramic statue of
a bunny. Adorable, incredibly cute. And this needle point is
really lovely. I don't even know how to describe it,
but it's beautiful, and it's lovely that you finished all
of that. Yeah, I love that conceptually very much. Yeah,
I am sorry for the loss of your husband's grandmother
(40:44):
who had passed away while working on this. Anyway, beautiful,
what a great email. So thank you again, Ellen for
this email and for the PDF from some Chinese ghosts
and these beautiful pictures'autiful story. If you would like to
send us a note or a history podcast atiheartradio dot com.
(41:05):
If you would like to see our show notes with
all of the sources for the episode, including all of
Rebecca Smith Pollard's work that we talked about, that is
at our website, which is missinhistory dot com. And you
can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and
anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
(41:29):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Sometime last year, some folks
here at work asked if we had anything planned for
(00:22):
the show to go along with the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that's being celebrated
this year. I think it is safe to say that
there is not a year in which either of us
would really be interested in the kind of like over
the top patriotism and national pride that is usually expected
(00:45):
to go along with that kind of a milestone observance.
We especially were not in the mood for that when
we were asked twenty twenty five. I did, though, go
looking around to see if there was anything that was
kind of more off the beaten path that might spark
my interests and also let us say to the folks
that work, yes, there will be something related on the
(01:07):
calendar our recent episode on Kasimir Pulaski. Unrelated to that conversation.
That is just a coincidence somehow in my search for
something that would let us say, yes, we do have
something on the calendar. I found Rebecca Smith Pollard, who
also published under the name Kate Harrington, and her connection
(01:29):
to the US Simmy Quincentennial is that she published a
book of poems to mark the US Centennial in eighteen
seventy six. That is not much of a connection, and
this episode's also mostly not about that, because Rebecca Smith
Pollard's major influence was not this book of poems that
she published. It was creating a method for teaching children
(01:51):
to read that was really influential in her time and
still has relevance today. She also wrote a novel that
was meant in part as a critical response to Harriet
Beecher Stowe's anti slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, so we're
going to be talking about that as well. Rebecca Harrington
Smith was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, on September twentieth,
(02:14):
eighteen thirty one. Her mother, Marjorie, was born in Ireland
and immigrated to the US with her family when she
was a child. Rebecca's father, Nathaniel Ruggles Smith, was born
in Massachusetts, went to Harvard and then became a teacher,
mostly in private schools. He liked to teach the works
of Shakespeare, and he wrote his own grammar and spelling books.
(02:37):
A grammar textbook by Samuel Kirkham described Nathaniel Ruggles Smith
as a quote distinguished and acute grammarian. Nathaniel also established
and edited a literary journal called the Hesperus, and Rebecca
was their youngest child. Yeah, that literary journal was apparently
one of the first, if not the first literary journals
(02:59):
published west of the Mississippi. It's been a running theme
on the show lately that we don't know much about
people's early lives. But we don't know much about Rebecca's
early life. There's even some uncertainty about her middle name.
A couple of sources I found gave it as Hutchinson
rather than Harrington. I'm not totally sure, but I think
(03:21):
this is because she had an older sister named Rebecca
Hutchinson who only lived for a few months, and that
was the year before this Rebecca was born. At some point,
the Smith family moved west. First they moved to Ohio
and then to Kentucky. Apparently this move is because Marjorie
was ill and they hope that the change of climate
(03:42):
would help her. It's hard to say what impact this
had but from what I was able to piece together.
Marjorie Smith lived until eighteen seventy two, when she died
at the age of eighty four. She outlived Rebecca's father,
who died in eighteen fifty nine at the age of
seventy five. While living in Kentuck, Ucky, Rebecca became a teacher,
and she also started publishing her writing. She published poems
(04:06):
in the Louisville Journal under the name Kate Harrington, often
with a notation of prairie cottage and the year the
poem was written at the end. In eighteen fifty four,
she and another poet, miss M. E. Wilson, of Maysville, Kentucky,
each wrote a poem called Moonlight Tryst that was inscribed
to the other. These were published in the Journal, together
(04:27):
with a note from the editor saying that quote, two
of our romantic young poetesses, living more than one thousand
miles apart, made a covenant to meet in spirit on
a particular night and talk to each other in poetry.
When Kate Harrington didn't submit anything to the paper for
a while, in eighteen fifty five, her next poem appeared
(04:48):
with this note from the editor, quote, we are heartily
glad to see you back. Dear Kate, you must never
play truant so long again. She also published essays in
other newspapers around Kentucky. Sometime in the mid eighteen fifties,
the family moved to Iowa, and in eighteen fifty six
Rebecca published a novel titled Emma Bartlett or Prejudice and Fanaticism.
(05:12):
The title page said that it was by an American lady,
but the copyright statement lists it as the work of R. H. Smith.
In the words of her review and the Ohio Statesman quote,
the heroine, Emma Bartlett, is the offspring of a young
and lively German woman who was driven with her relatives
by political and religious persecution from her own land to
(05:35):
seek a home in America. She illustrates, through a succession
of thrilling scenes, the character of a gentle, noble, and
gifted woman suffering from the evils with which a corrupt
social system and an unwise and unjust prescription have surrounded her.
So as Tracy mentioned at the top of the show,
(05:56):
this book was written at least in part as a
response to Harry at beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin,
which was published in book form in eighteen fifty two
and became a bestseller. Uncle Tom's Cabin, of course, has
its own very complicated legacy. Among other things, it was
straightforwardly anti slavery and as credited with sparking a surge
(06:19):
in abolitionist sentiment in the US, but it also depicted
black people in a very heavily stereotyped way, and Uncle
Tom became an insult to describe Black people who were
perceived as subservient or complicit in their own oppression. At
least thirty novels were written in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin,
(06:40):
which are often grouped together under the umbrella of Anti
Tom literature. At least a third of these novels were
by women, and they were mostly written by writers living
in the South. A lot of Anti Tom novels were
explicitly pro slavery. I did not read this entire book,
(07:01):
but I did read selections from it, and Emma Bartlett
has kind of a broader focus than that. In the
words of a piece in the Weekly Courier of Atumwa, Iowa,
it was quote designed to illustrate the evils of abolitionism
and no nothingism. The review from The Ohio Statesman that
we read from earlier described the book as exposing quote,
(07:24):
political and religious prejudice and fanaticism as seen in Abolitionism,
No Nothingism, and Kindred heresies. Abolitionism was obviously the abolition
of slavery. The No Nothing Party was an anti immigrant
and anti Catholic political party that flourished in the eighteen fifties.
(07:44):
Its name purportedly came from the idea that if members
were asked about any nativist organizations they belonged to, they
would say they knew nothing. Smith does not seem to
have been Catholic herself. Her family were Presbyterians, but she
was sympathetic toward Catholics and opposed to the anti Catholic
prejudice that was widespread in the nineteenth century. Some of
(08:08):
this prejudice was connected to the influx of Catholic immigrants
from Ireland who were fleeing the Great Famine that started
in the eighteen forties. So Smith wrote this novel, too,
exposed No Nothingism as evil, and she apparently thought abolitionism
was just as bad. The books, abolitionist characters are hypocrites
(08:30):
and they have self serving motivations. There are rebuttals against
abolitionist arguments scattered throughout conversations that take place among the
various characters, like at one point, someone describes the idea
of people as property as shocking, and the response is quote,
and yet who first brought them into a position to
(08:51):
be sold as such? Was it not the inhabitants of
that portion of the globe whose descendants are now continually
crying against the sin of slavery? Good gracious. Another conversation
frames accounts of brutality being carried out on southern plantations
as overblown or even fabricated, basically the same kind of
(09:13):
nonsense that still is in Internet comment sections today. We're
not saying that depicting something in a book is the
same as believing or endorsing it. Plenty of writers depict
evil or prejudice or violence in their books without it
being an expression of their own beliefs or tendencies. But
(09:34):
this book was explicitly written for political reasons. It is
dedicated to the quote true upholders of the Constitution and
of the firm supporters of our glorious Union. The preface
to the first edition said that she quote endeavored to
present some facts in fiction just shaking my head. No, oh, Rebecca,
(09:58):
I didn't know any of this when I picked her.
That's what makes it good. That's what makes it a
good thing to discuss. In the introduction to the second
edition of the novel, Smith described it as demonstrating quote
two or three notions which have of late grown to
the importance of political doctrines to be great political and
(10:22):
social evils. The two chief conclusions which she thought these
facts established were that a fellow creature's place of birth
should not be made the test of his capabilities or
intrinsic worth, and that there is neither reason, religion, nor
justice in crushing the white man in order to liberate
(10:42):
the blacks from a bondage in which they have been
placed by circumstances which no ordinary foresight of man and
no ordinary exercise of humanity could have prevented. Once again,
I say, oh, Rebecca. In this book and other writings,
Smith was also so deeply opposed to the idea of
dissolving the Union over the issue of slavery. That's one
(11:06):
of the reasons that she framed abolitionism as a fanatical evil.
She thought that the abolitionists were forcing the country toward
a civil War. Near the end of Emma Bartlett, a
character even recites a five stanza poem that argues stridently
against dissevering the Union. Unfortunately, this book, which was written
(11:28):
when she was twenty five, is the biggest example we
have of Rebecca Smith Pollard's thoughts on this. I looked
through newspapers for other stories or essays or poems that
she might have written later on to see if they
revealed anything in how or whether her opinions might have
evolved during and after the Civil War, and I really
did not find all that much. Her eighteen seventy six
(11:50):
books Centennial and Other Poems does include a dirge for
Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and one
of the founders of the Report publican party. He was
deeply opposed to compromising over the issue of slavery and
the lead up to the Civil War. So this poem
describes Greeley, who was one of the people who worked
(12:12):
to convince Abraham Lincoln to commit to ending slavery with
the Civil War, as a spirit who quote so nobly
endeavored to save from disunion the land of the free.
So does this poem mean that she came to see
slaveholders as the threat to the union rather than abolitionists.
I really cannot say I have theories. See you Friday.
(12:37):
We will get to her work as an educator after
a sponsor break. On April sixth, eighteen fifty eight, Rebecca
Harrington Smith married poet and newspaper editor Oliver I. Taylor.
(12:58):
An announcement of their marriage and The Little Journal described
Rebecca as having achieved considerable eminence in the literary world.
On their wedding anniversary a year later, they welcomed a
daughter named Mary. Sadly, Oliver died of typhoid in eighteen sixty.
Two years later, Rebecca married James Pollard, who was elected
(13:19):
to the Iowa State Senate that year. James had four
children from a previous marriage, and he and Rebecca had
three surviving children together, Adelaide, Eleanor, and Joseph Addison Smith Pollard.
Most written mentions of Joseph refer to him by his
initials JAS. In eighteen seventy, Pollard published a book of
(13:42):
poetry under the name Kate Harrington. It was called In
Memoriam Maymy April sixth, eighteen sixty nine. It was in
memory of her daughter Mary, who died on that date,
which was her tenth birthday and the anniversary of Rebecca's
wedding to Mary's late father. This was a series of
poems that were written for her daughter, but also to
(14:04):
any other mother who had loved and lost a child. Quote,
it matters little what her station proved, or of what nation, race,
or tribe she'd be. I'll place her sympathy beyond all price.
I'll give her confidence and perfect trust. Such friendship true
and strong as never dies, but lives. When lips that pledge,
(14:26):
it turned to dust. Pollard apparently had an ongoing correspondence
with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote to her that this
collection brought tears to his eyes. I found references to
this in writing about Pollard, but I did not find
the actual letter. Pollard's books, Centennial and Other Poems, came
out in eighteen seventy six, also published under the name
(14:48):
Kate Harrington. This collection starts with Iowa's Centennial Poem, which
is a patriotic poem celebrating the American Revolution. Of course,
Iowa was not really part of the Revolution at the time.
What is now Iowa was claimed by Spain and not Britain.
This poem starts out describing Iowa as a barren wild
(15:09):
one hundred years before, home only to indigenous people, who
she refers to as the Red Man. But it goes quote,
we share the nation's glory to by holding to the
world's broadview. Our men of mark are genius, rare, scattered
like sunbeams everywhere. The United States Centennial took place just
(15:30):
a decade after the official end of the Civil War,
so this was near the end of the reconstruction era,
and federal troops were still stationed in South Carolina, Florida,
and Louisiana, so for some people this was a strange
and difficult time to be celebrating a national centennial. The
country still seemed very divided. A lot of ways it
(15:50):
was becoming more divided. This poem alludes to this, calling
for quote prodigal suns to return and to be given
a generous welcome, and to quote give them robes of
a right royal hue. Let the rings that the restore
them be offered by victors who honor the blue. The
poem ends, quote, we ask you to pledge them, truehearted,
(16:14):
a covenant promise anew remembering mong Patriots Departed No Line Parts,
The Gray from the Blue Centennial and other poems. Also
includes poems two and about members of Pollard's family, including
her late daughter, a memorial to William G. Bell Knap,
son of Grant's Secretary of War, William Wurst bell Nap,
(16:36):
a temperance poem, some nature poems, and some poems that
were written by her late father. In addition to writing poetry,
Pollard continued to work as a teacher, mainly at schools
for girls, including in Keokuk, Iowa. That's a school that
she ran from eighteen seventy five to eighteen seventy seven.
It seems like she and her husband, James were separated
(16:59):
by eighteen seven seventy seven, so especially after that, her
teaching and her writing would have been really necessary to
support herself and her children. James died in nineteen oh two.
It seems like Pollard was ahead of her time as
a teacher. Nineteenth century schools often involved a lot of
learning by rote and strict discipline, but she taught hands
(17:20):
on history lessons with her students dressing up and re
enacting battles. She cut up apples to help students learn
about fractions, and she had a classroom garden outside of
the school. Part of the lesson involved pulling up some
of the plants at different stages of their development to
see how they grew. In eighteen eighty seven, Pollard was
awarded a patent under the name R. S. Pollard. This
(17:44):
was for an educational appliance, and here's how the patents
described this invention. Quote two or more plates connected together
and shifting upon or within each other, and having upon
their faces a series of characters, which, upon a proper
shifting of the plate's form, and convey to the eye
and mind different impressions, meanings and objects which singly or
(18:07):
improperly grouped. They do not indicate whereby the mind of
a student is trained by the constructive and synthetic methods
in the formation of objects, characters, and the language. In
one of the accompanying illustrations, one of the plates is
a ring with a series of letters written on it
like S, RP, and M. The other plate is in
(18:30):
the middle and it has the letters A through T.
So by turning that outer ring you can see how
these letters combine to form words sat, rat, pat, and MATT.
Another illustration shows this setup being used for arithmetic. These
devices would be made from blackboard or something else that
could be a RaSE, so that a teacher could prepare
(18:51):
the board to go along with whatever the day's lessons were.
Pollard had started teaching back when she was living with
her parents in Kentucky. At this point, she had at
least two decades of experience as a teacher. She also
had her father's example as a teacher, and she had
decided that teaching children phonics was critical to their learning
(19:12):
to read. This was right in the middle of a
century's long debate in the United States about how best
to teach children to read. The idea of teaching children
through phonics very basically meaning the relationship between letters and
the sounds that they make, goes back to at least
the sixteenth century, when the first formal schools started to
(19:33):
be established in North America. Children were typically taught the
alphabet and the sounds made by each letter. Students put
that into practice by reading the Bible or historic or
political texts. Since there were no text books made specifically
for children until the seventeenth century, I'll just say I
did not look into the history of reading education outside
(19:55):
of the United States. At all for this episode, so
we are not going to be talking about that. Some
of the earliest reading and spelling textbooks in North America
were phonics based. Those included Noah Webster's The American Spelling Book,
also called The Blue Backed Speller, which came out in
seventeen eighty three. He also released A Grammar in seventeen
(20:16):
eighty four and A Reader in seventeen eighty five. We
talked about Webster and his influence more in our two
parter on the Dictionary Wars, which came out in June
of twenty twenty three. In the mid eighteen hundreds, school
started moving away from phonics in favor of a method
that focused on learning whole words, or the look say method.
(20:37):
One advocate of this was Thomas Hopkins Gaaladet, founder of
the first American School for the Deaf and namesake of
Gallaudet University. In his book The Mother's Primer to Teach
Her Child Its Letters, he wrote, quote in the common modes,
what can be more uninteresting than to commence with teaching
a child to call certain arbitrary marks or letters which
(20:59):
in themselves have no meaning, by certain arbitrary sounds or
names of the letters, which also have no meaning. What
an unintelligible and irksome task it must be. So Galiadet's
method paired words with pictures, like a picture of a
cat along with the word cat, so that the student
could learn that whole word rather than its component letters.
(21:23):
This method probably made a lot of sense to Galandet
because of his work with Death and Heart of hearing
students who either couldn't hear the sounds that were made
by different letters and letter combinations, or couldn't hear them
very well. But this method did not provide a way
for students to decode written words that they didn't already know,
other than to try to work it out from context
(21:45):
or maybe from illustrations that might be on the page.
The first books designed for this method also only went
up to the third grade, and by necessity, they were
focused on words for concrete objects and concepts that can
be illustrated, so consequently their vocabulary was kind of limited.
The Mother's Primer was written for the parents of hearing students,
(22:07):
and starting in the eighteen forties, Galliaut's method was popularized
outside of schools for the deaf, in part by educational
reformer Horace Mann. Man advocated teaching children to read by
focusing on whole words and only after that to focus
on the alphabet and spelling. This whole word model was
(22:28):
fiercely debated among educators, but in the later part of
the nineteenth century it gradually became more widely used than
phonics based instruction in the United States. So that brings
us back to Rebecca Smith Pollard in the late eighteen eighties,
so about forty years after Horace mann started popularizing the
look say method, she created a whole system for teaching reading,
(22:52):
including a reader, a speller, and a teacher's manual, and
it was based on phonics, which we will talk more
about after a sponsor break. In eighteen eighty nine, Rebecca
Smith Pollard published her first synthetic reader, synthetic Speller, and
(23:15):
a complete manual Pollard Synthetic Method of Reading and Spelling,
which was a step by step guide for teachers on
how to use the other two books with their students.
She wrote in the preface to the manual, quote, instead
of teaching the word as a whole and afterwards subjecting
it to phonic analysis, is it not infinitely better to
(23:36):
take the sounds of the letters for our starting point,
and with those sounds lay a foundation firm and broad,
upon which we can build whole families of words for
instant recognition. Her method included what she referred to as
busy work, in which children practice sounding out letters or
drew latters that were used to illustrate the progression of
(23:58):
tones that different vowels could make, or drew wheels with
a sound in the center and a spoke for each
word that can be made by adding a letter to
that sound. She described these as families, so for example,
the ot the Aught family included words like pot tot
rot and cot uh. There was a lot of busy work.
(24:19):
Those are just examples, but Pollard also acknowledged the need
to make things fun, incorporating drawing and sketching and singing
to illustrate different concepts. In the preface, she wrote, quote,
why should not something be used to awaken and hold
the interest of children in the drudgery of the first
lessons in reading? Are not splints, balls, toothpicks, clay and
(24:41):
sandwork used for this purpose In teaching the first principles
of arithmetic and geography. Every intelligent teacher knows when the
developing mind of the child no longer needs these devices
or helps in the last names branches, Why should there
be any question as to when the devices of this
method have served their purpose. Pollard's method of teaching phonics
(25:04):
involved focusing on the twenty six letters of the alphabet
and all the different sounds they can be used to represent. Students'
textbooks were illustrated to help students remember sounds associated with
different letters, like r R was shown next to a
growling dog, while H was next to a panting dog.
(25:24):
Stories incorporated the words and sounds that were the focus
of a particular lesson, and these became more advanced over time,
so lesson one in pollard Synthetic first reader focused on
single syllable words that rhymed with hat, can, or bag,
while the first lesson and the second reader is focused
on words ending in ing, as well as talk, walk,
(25:46):
each piece, and square. These textbooks sorted the letters into
vowels and consonants, and then sorted the consonant sounds into
subvocals or voiced consonants, and aspirates or whispers. She also
described sounds as labial, lingual, dental, guttural, and pure aspirate
depending on where in the mouth each sound was formed.
(26:10):
After learning the letters and these sounds, students could move
on to learning combinations of sounds, like digraphs and trigraphs.
Pollard's books also included tables of all the diacritical marks
and the sounds they corresponded to. The busy work included
having students mark their textbooks with diacritical marks corresponding to
(26:31):
the sounds made by each letter in each word. This
was controversial, both because people objected to the idea of
students writing in books and because people thought this busy
work was tedious. Pollard later suggested having students make their
marks on a piece of transparent material, so the book
itself remained unmarked. Pollard did not invent the idea of
(26:55):
teaching phonics, As we said, a lot of the earliest
reading textbooks for children in the United States were phonics
based until the field of teaching had moved toward a
whole word approach. But she was one of the first
to combine spelling and reading books with a teacher's manual
so that everything went together. She also developed literature readers
(27:17):
that became gradually more advanced for children to move on
to after they had mastered the basics. She developed all
of this material over the course of about eight years
with the help of her daughter Adelaide, who had also
become a teacher and also wrote hymns. Pollard's phonics based
reading instruction became really influential in the late nineteenth and
(27:38):
early twentieth centuries. Her system was used all over the country,
and multiple other textbook writers took inspiration from her. A
review of Pollard's Advanced Speller appeared in the journal Education
in eighteen ninety seven. The reviewer wrote, quote, this book
teaches the pupil to spell, which is its great merit.
(27:59):
The need of such book is made painfully evident by
the newspapers, the books, and the business letters that one
reads bad spelling is a fault of our busy her
read American life. The author of this volume has done
much to correct this fault. We believe in her system.
It teaches its students to think as well as to
write and speak correctly. It teaches him to note accurately
(28:23):
the component parts of a word to form a scientific
opinion as to its proper pronunciation. We would like to
have our own children taught by this system, and we
hope to secure the introduction of this book in the
schools attended by them. We commend it to all teachers.
Proponents of Pollard's method included Edward Everett Hale, who was
(28:44):
an advocate of education for the Freed people and of
the Chautauqua adult education movement. In the History and Pedagogy
of reading with the Review of the History of Reading
and Writing and of Methods and Texts and Hygiene in Reading,
which came out in nineteen fifteen, Ian Edmund Burke Hughey
wrote of Pollard's method quote, the main business of the
(29:04):
method is to make the child able to pronounce words
for himself as he comes to them in reading new matter,
and it accomplishes this result pretty effectually. Hue also described
the method as having been worked out with care and completeness,
and as successful at getting children to learn word structure
and word calling, or recognizing and calling out the words,
(29:27):
but he didn't praise Pollard's method across the board. He
also described it as quote intensely artificial and adult in
its conceptions, and destructive of right habits of reading and
of using language generally. He was also of the opinion
that working up from phonetic elements, to words, to ideas,
to sentences as the opposite of how the mind naturally works.
(29:51):
In her later years, Rebecca Smith Pollard wrote a number
of religious hymns, and in eighteen ninety one she wrote
a letter to George t Amas, founder and first president
of the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, noting, quote,
the kindly mention you frequently make of our Catholic friends.
So Pollard, based on the way Angel had written about Catholics,
(30:14):
thought that he might appreciate an experience she'd had while
traveling to train teachers to use her reading methods. That
included visiting a lot of convents to train the nuns
who taught in Catholic schools. She said she had been
dealing with an eye inflammation for some time during one
of these visits, and one of the Catholic mothers told
her not to go to the doctor yet, but that
(30:35):
they would have all eleven hundred children in their schools
pray for her quote what wonder that the shadows lifted,
the clouds dispersed, and that ere the week had ended,
there was not to dim my vision save the grateful
tears which I could not banish when I remembered how
quickly the Loving Savior responded to the children's calls. Pollard's
(30:57):
last published poem was called Althea or the Morning Glory,
and it came out in nineteen twelve, when she was eighty.
Unlike most of her earlier poetry work, she published it
under her own name, Rebecca S. Pollard. It's a long poem,
It's more than thirty pages, and it's a meditation on
faith and mortality with a lot of flower imagery. Rebecca
(31:19):
Smith Pollard lost most of her eyesight toward the end
of her life. She spent the last years of her
life living with her son in Fort Madison, Iowa. She
died there on May twenty ninth, nineteen seventeen, at the
age of eighty five. A poem she had written several
years earlier but had never published, titled Heaven, was read
at her funeral. She was buried at Farmington Cemetery with
(31:42):
a marker that says Rebecca Smith Pollard and then under
that in quotation marks Kate Harrington. Around the time of
Pollard's death, phonics started to fall out of favor again
in the United States, with reading instruction once again moving
back to focus on whole words. In nineteen fifty five,
Rudolph Flesh's book Why Johnny Can't Read criticized the abandonment
(32:05):
of phonics, which led to another resurgence in phonics based instruction.
Then that shifted once again with a move toward whole
language instruction in the nineteen eighties, and then the evolution
of balanced literacy in the nineteen nineties. This back and
forth is sometimes characterized as the reading wars. Uh yeah,
(32:25):
I would say both the back and forth and the
discussion around the back and forth has been characterized as
the reading wars. Balanced literacy has been described as kind
of a happy medium between phonics and whole word instruction,
taking the best parts of each of them, but there
has also been a lot of variation in exactly what's
(32:47):
involved in different methods that have been under this umbrella
of balanced literacy. Some of its critics described balance literacy
as mainly a variation on whole word instruction without enough fun.
Most recently, the idea of three quing that is part
of some balanced literacy systems has come up under really
(33:07):
heavy criticism. Three queuing involves trying to figure out the
meanings of unfamiliar words based on context clues or pictures,
or making a guess based on the sound made by
the first letter, rather than teaching children how to sound
out or decode unfamiliar words. A lot of public interest
(33:28):
and criticism of this followed reporting by Emily Hanford at
American Public Media, and then a podcast that came out
of that reporting called SOULD a story in twenty twenty two. Today,
in the US, there's been a growing movement towards the
science of reading, which bases reading instruction on techniques that
can be backed by scientific evidence of their efficacy. Broadly speaking,
(33:52):
phonics and phonemic awareness are two components of the science
of reading, which also includes multiple other elements like vocabulary
and reading comprehension. Because being able to sound out the
word based on its letters or phonemes is only one
step in the process of understanding what something means. The
Science of Reading isn't a program for reading instruction, though,
(34:14):
it's more of a body of research into reading and
literacy and the use of that research to guide programs
that teach reading. And there is still, of course, a
ton of controversy around exactly how best to implement all
of this research. Yeah, I have seen a number of
discussions among teachers and other people who work in education
(34:35):
who feel like some uh, some systems that are framed
as science of reading, feel like that that's just the
phonics part and not all of this other part that
is also necessary to really being able to read, and
this part being able to figure out what individual words
are if you're not familiar with them, or even if
(34:57):
you are. That is just one component of what is
being described as a literacy crisis in the US. After
I finished this whole outline, like first thing this morning,
I saw an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
that talked about other factors contributing to this literacy crisis,
including smartphones, which the author of this article was like,
(35:20):
I was kind of a naysayer and thinking smartphones were
a problem, but there is a growing body of evidence
that smartphones really are playing a role. Other factors were
early reliance on AI chatbots to try to get information,
and a shift in the way not just like the
reading of words is taught, but once you get into
(35:41):
reading pieces of work, a shift away from reading complete
works to instead trying to get core pieces of information
from very short excerpts so instead of reading the entirety
of a novel, reading a small amount of it and
testing comprehension that small amount, which sort of has left
(36:02):
people getting into high school and college without sort of
the reading stamina to read whole long works and analyze
and follow them. We obviously are not teachers. We do
not have hands on experience with all of this, but
it is clear that there has been a lot of
(36:25):
debate about all of this in recent decades. It's things
that are having a clear impact and how students are
taught and how society functions as people are or are
not able to read and make sense out of information.
So that's Rebecca Smith Pollard ahead of her time in
some ways but not others. Do you want to read
(36:47):
and make sense out of some listener mail? Yes? This
is kind of funny that we're talking about reading comprehension
because I had to ask Collie earlier if she remembered
me reading this email already. We don't think I read
this email ready, but apologies if I have read it twice.
This is from Ellen. Ellen wrote another vote for a
loft codiohearn and wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I started
(37:09):
listening to your podcast when I had a very long
commute to a job was giving me insomnia and panic attacks.
I was working for a very critical supervisor. I'm just
going to skip ahead and say having a really rough time.
And I remember when I read this email the first time.
I got very choked up at the next part, in
which Ellen said, I especially appreciated your Friday blessing when
(37:33):
you tell us all that you hope we have a
RESTful weekend and do something that makes us happy. I
want you to know how meaningful that little kindness was
to me during that time. Now, thankfully I have a
much better job, but still do a lot of driving,
so I often have thoughts Velveteen Rabbit, Philip Glass embroidery.
They have not yet made it into an email, but
when I was listening to the Elizabeth Bisland episode and
(37:56):
heard the name left coddioharn, I thought that name sounds familiar.
As he went on, I remembered I have a book
by him. Back in the early nineteen nineties. My mother
gave me his book Some Chinese Ghosts after I returned
from living in Taiwan for a couple of years. She
knew I was enjoying reading the sort of weird old
books you find in used book sales. This book was
(38:16):
published in eighteen eighty seven, and my copy is a
reprint by the Modern Library from nineteen twenty seven. The
intro to this volume is a short bio of hern
written in such an entertaining and old fashioned style, I
decided to scan it and attach it for you. While
his whole life story is extremely interesting, the book itself
is a pretty rough read. It's full of Chinese transliterations,
(38:38):
Victorian orientalism, and lofty prose. Sounds about right. According to
his bio, this book was typical of his strange genius,
and he considered it quote an attempt in the direction
I hope to make triumph someday poetical prose poorlof Codio.
He was not a very good judge of what people
in the future would like to read. Maybe he would
(38:58):
be a good candidate for a Halloween eppisode because, apparently
quote he gives the reader a ghostly shutter by building
up an intimacy with the unseen. I will pause to
say I have him like as a potential October topic
for that reason. To return to the email. Since Embroidery
was also a recent topic. I'm sending you a photo
of my first needle point project, which I inherited unfinished
(39:20):
from my husband's grandmother. She had started it as a
wedding present for me and had finished about a third
of it when she passed away. I had never done
needle point before, but it was such a beautiful pattern
based on an artwork by Mukha that I decided to
try it. After all, needle point is just one stitch,
how hard can it be? Well? It ended up taking
four years to finish it, as it is quite large,
(39:42):
but since then I've completed several much smaller projects and
even learned to do more than one stitch. As pet tax,
here is a photo of our grand tortoise. He is
a Russian tortoise named Ivan the Turtble. He loves to
go outside and dig in the garden and is fond
of you, snowdrops, dianthus and Petunia's when he can reach them.
(40:03):
Thank you so much for your podcast, and especially for
being your lovely, smart, kind, unique selves. You make me
feel better about the world. Best wishes, Ellen. I want
the email to show me the blocked content. Oh my goodness,
we have a little tortoise out in the yard looking
(40:23):
at what appears to be a small ceramic statue of
a bunny. Adorable, incredibly cute. And this needle point is
really lovely. I don't even know how to describe it,
but it's beautiful, and it's lovely that you finished all
of that. Yeah, I love that conceptually very much. Yeah,
I am sorry for the loss of your husband's grandmother
(40:44):
who had passed away while working on this. Anyway, beautiful,
what a great email. So thank you again, Ellen for
this email and for the PDF from some Chinese ghosts
and these beautiful pictures'autiful story. If you would like to
send us a note or a history podcast atiheartradio dot com.
(41:05):
If you would like to see our show notes with
all of the sources for the episode, including all of
Rebecca Smith Pollard's work that we talked about, that is
at our website, which is missinhistory dot com. And you
can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and
anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
(41:29):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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