The McGuffey Readers

The mid-1970s is an interesting point in time to re-examine William McGuffey's First Eclectic Reader. Most school districts long ago abandoned the Readers; but some are just now rediscovering them as part of a movement called "Back to Basics." Some contemporary educators believe that the Eclectic Readers promote good vocabulary skills, accurate orthography, and earlier reading comprehension than more modern—and perhaps less didactic—instructional books.

The Readers also promote certain cultural attitudes that the "Back to Basics" parents and schools seek. The Readers embody strong moral lessons that children absorbed as they read their way through, lesson by lesson. This, of course, was not accidental. The purpose of nineteenth-century American schools—be it an old, established New England town school, an elite Southern school, or a frontier common school—was to prepare citizens in character and proper principles. Noah Webster claimed in 1810 that his American Spelling Book would "instil into [children's] minds, with the first rudiments of language, some just ideas of religion, morals and domestic economy."¹ A textbook was expected to foster those virtues that were valued by a pious, middle-class society; and the authors of textbooks took their charge most seriously. Many authors believed that the texts they wrote were responsible for the creation of that most elusive quality—a national character.

The first American readers were published during the 1780s, and almost every other year for the next twenty years another new title would appear. Most of those readers, and indeed the accompanying geographies, spellers, and math books, were produced by teachers and scholars from New England. In 1849 George W. Bethune wrote that "nearly all of our teachers, with the authors of our school books, and a very large proportion of our preachers, as well as our editors . . . come from, or receive their education in New England."²

But this was not true of William Holmes McGuffey. He was born in western Pennsylvania, in Washington County, in the year 1800. His parents had been raised in the county by immigrant Scots and Irish pioneers. When William was three, the McGuffey family pushed West into the fertile Western Reserve and settled in a section of Ohio known as Trumbull County. The city of Youngstown was nearby—a village then.

William's mother, Anna Holmes McGuffey, was better educated than her husband and it was she who taught William to read and cipher. He in turn taught his younger brothers and sisters. When a common school was established nearby, William attended. He soon outgrew it, however, and was sent to live and study with the Reverend Wick in Youngstown. Before William was fourteen years old, he had been hired as a common school teacher for a cluster of twenty-three families in Calcutta, Ohio. He held school for a four-month term, taught forty-eight children of various ages, and received a salary of $46.00.

Though now qualified as a teacher, William aspired to further education for himself. He went to the Old Stone Academy in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where he lived with the Presbyterian minister and worked as a janitor for the Church in order to cover his four-dollar-a-term school bill. McGuffey went on to Washington College in Washington, Pennsylvania, where he studied the standard academic fare of the day, Greek and Latin.

Again McGuffey turned to teaching, and again he gave it up to return to the matter of his own education. This time he enrolled in Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. The president of the school, the Reverend Robert Hamilton Bishop, was so impressed by his new student that he offered McGuffey a professorship in the Greek and Latin languages.

McGuffey remained at Miami University as a professor until 1836. There he met and married Miss Harriet Spinning. And, to his home in Miami, William called his younger brother Alexander to live and study with him.

The white frame house on Spring Street in Oxford that McGuffey bought for his bride Harriet was soon enlarged by a brick addition to house their growing family. It was here that McGuffey tried out his educational system...