Abstract
It is particularly difficult to interpret historical texts used in teaching when little is known about the way in which these materials were exploited: careful reading of the content of the texts gives no indication of how they were used by the teachers and by the pupils. The following contribution shows the importance of the “teaching context”, in the particular case of the religious texts used to teach reading to beginners from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Prayers, psalms, catechism lessons and Bible extracts were all used for purposes of both religious instruction and teaching literacy. How was this possible? How could texts of religious significance, spiritual meaning and liturgical function be used as supports for teaching literacy to children? Today’s researchers were taught to read in a very different way when they were children. As it is difficult not to project evidence from these memories and from generally accepted beliefs about reading onto historical situations, it is necessary to take some methodological precautions. To identify any anachronisms that can produce these retrospective projections, we will start by comparing contemporary and historical sources on this subject.
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Notes
- 1.
This contribution is part of research conducted since 1996 into the history of school subjects by the History of Education Department of the INRP (National Institute for Educational Research). Elementary learning (reading, writing and arithmetic) poses an interesting methodological and epistemological problem as it does not have a ‘reference discipline’ (there are no university chairs of ‘reading, writing and arithmetic’). They are considered as technical skills having no particular purpose in themselves, relevant in the past for passing on empiric information and today for theoretical modelling in the fields of psychology, linguistics and cognitive science. Regarding reading skills, historians treated this as a two-stage indicator of literacy (being literate or illiterate), before discovering an intermediate stage, that no longer exists today (being able to read but not to write), which denied literacy tuition in former times some of the motivations and the effects which are expected today (Graff 1981). Hence further investigations into reading practices over the centuries. Some studies refer to the act of reading in its broad cultural context (the social status of the written word in political, legal and religious spheres, the conflict between oral and written culture and between high and popular culture); others record the material constraints imposed by the writing itself (texts written on scrolls, codices, coded phonetically or with ideographs, continuous or segmented, handwritten or printed, reproduced orally or in silence, etc.) For a perspective from Antiquity to the twentieth century, see (Carvallo and Chartier 1999). The third line of research which I am engaged in is the history of learning and teaching methods, within and outside the school setting. This article summarizes, with new critical scrutiny, previously published data on the history of reading methods, official requirements, textbooks and student workbooks (Chartier and Hébrard 2001; Chartier 2004a, b, 2007, 2009).
- 2.
Transitory writing is nearly always destroyed by the authors. The texts written by schoolchildren (Mesopotamian tablets, Hellenistic papyri, monastic copies, Renaissance students’ exercise books, eighteenth century Latin schoolboy texts) that have been found represent only a very small fraction of the work undertaken while learning, but they do provide invaluable information to limit anachronisms when attempting to reconstruct the ‘teaching context’.
- 3.
- 4.
Jacques de Batencourt, L’école paroissiale, 1654, Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, Conduite des écoles chrétiennes, 1720 in (Chartier et~al. 1976).
- 5.
John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning education, 1693; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile ou de l’Education, 1761.
- 6.
See for example, Ratio studiorum [1599] in (Demoustier and Julia 1997).
- 7.
Edmund Coote, The English Schoole-Master, 1624, [48 publications from 1596 to 1696], quoted by D. Cressy (1980, 38).
- 8.
One of the first studies carried out in France was by James Guillaume, author of the very well informed article ‘Lecture’ in the Dictionnaire de Pédagogie edited by Ferdinand Buisson, published in 1887. For England and the USA, see (Mathews 1966; Banton Smith 1965 [1934]).
- 9.
Rapet, “De l’organisation de l’enseignement dans les écoles primaires”, Journal des instituteurs 34, 19 August 1860, 118, 119. (Chartier 2007).
- 10.
A discordant or even a crisis situation is created when reading acquires a new function that forces a change in learning objectives without the teachers being able to formulate new teaching methods. This was the case when the old methods, suitable for reading ‘timeless’ and ‘classic’ texts (e.g. religious, moral, literary), continued to be used for reading ever-changing, ephemeral types of text, e.g. the press. The search for new methods stimulates the pedagogical imagination, and some of the solutions become imperative and lead to the establishment of new standards. New technical innovations (the hand press, then the steam printing press, low-cost pulp-based paper, metal pen nibs, typewriters, photocopiers and computers linked to printers) can, in certain cases, be adopted quickly when they do not disrupt teaching practices, or conversely, be slow to enter the school system because they disrupt the couple between the (unchanged) ends and the long established means employed to arrive there.
- 11.
Erasmus wrote De Civilitate morum puerum, in 1530. It was translated or imitated in many vernacular versions, which had a great success in schools from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
- 12.
Jimenes (2011).
- 13.
As oral exercises leave no trace, these curricula can only be described from teaching instructions and testimonies (from teachers or former pupils) when they exist. However, once the beginner knows how to read, the teaching curricula can be seen in the list of texts given to be studied, as shown in the Ratio Studiorum for studying Latin. Cf. (Compère 1985, 76–77).
- 14.
Charles Hoole, A new discovery of the old art of teaching schoole, 1660, quoted by D. Cressy (1980, 41). The spelling in the English text has been modernised.
- 15.
William Kempe, The education of children in learning, 1588, quoted by D. Cressy (1980, 22).
- 16.
Here is an example of a teaching practice described in “the school ordinance” in Lutheran Saxony, in 1580, quoted by (Strauss 1981, 102).
- 17.
Charles Hoole, op. cit., in (Cressy 1980, 21).
- 18.
Charles Hoole, op.cit., in (Cressy 1980, 21).
- 19.
Stages 4, 5, 6, 7 are described in J.-B. de La Salle, Conduite des écoles chrétiennes, 1720 (Chartier et~al. 1976).
- 20.
Chartier (2000).
- 21.
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and transl. by Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical library, 2001, 77 and 79. “My aim is the education of the perfect orator,” said Quintilian at the beginning of his famous De Institutione Oratoria. Learning how to read is dealt with in four paragraphs in the first of the twelve chapters making up book 1. Most of book 1 deals with the care that should be given to very young children, the choice of nannies, tutors and the language to be spoken and written. He thinks it preferable to start by teaching a child Greek, before moving on to Latin, which is less difficult. This means that little space is given to this question in the twelve books that make up the complete work.
- 22.
Rémi d’Auxerre (circ 850–910), in Patrologie latine, 131, 845, quoted in (Riché 1979, 223).
- 23.
Dioniso Caton, Libri Minoris et primum Catonis disticha Moralia, com Antonij Nebriissensis annotattionibus. Apud Inclytam Apuli, s.i., 1545.
- 24.
El Sabio Catón, Avisos y ejemplos del Sabio Catón Censorino Romano, reprint in Puebla de los Angeles, México, 1815, quoted by C. Castañeda et~al. (2004, 35–66).
- 25.
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905. After the premature death of his father, he and his mother Anne-Marie went to live with his maternal grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, who was a German scholar and author of several books on language teaching. The event took place in around 1908–1909 when he was between 3 or 4 years old, otherwise the family would not have spoken about his exceptional precocity.
- 26.
Le Men (1984).
- 27.
Sans Famille by Hector Malot was a successful novel (1878) and soon became a classic for young people.
- 28.
Sartre (1964, 16–17). Translated by I. Clephane (1964, 32).
- 29.
On the difference between oral and written accounts and the dichotomy between societies with and without writing, see (Goody 1987). The thesis that Goody defends is that literal repetition becomes the rule in societies with writing and that ethnologists often assume the consistency of oral accounts without having proof. He examined two versions that accompanied the same Bagré ritual held many years apart in Ghana and noted differences so great as to bring into question the reliability of the textual analyses carried out on corpora of myths collected from a single source.
- 30.
We find the same principle in the ‘Global method’ invented at the end of the nineteenth century, based on fairy stories the children ‘knew by heart’ (The Little Red Hen, The Gingerbread Man) and widely used by families. In class, the teacher either introduced an explicit procedure for analysing the words (the word method) or he waited for the children to find it intuitively and transfer it from known words to words they did not know (the whole word method) cf. (Banton Smith 1965 [1934]).
- 31.
Use of the spelling method declined from 1850. It is probable that Charles Schweitzer, Jean-Paul Sartre’s grandfather who he lived with, learned to read in this way.
- 32.
After attending a Koranic school, then a French school, Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900–1991) occupied several posts in colonial administration. In 1942, he was appointed to IFAN, (French Institute of Black Africa) in Dakar by Theodore Monod and worked in the ‘Ethnology’ section. He embarked on a collection of oral traditions in Senegal, Guinea, Niger, Upper Volta, Sudan, Mauritania and northern Cote d’Ivoire. The documentation of these surveys makes up the Amadou Hampâté Bâ archive in Dakar. From 1962 to 1970, he was a member of UNESCO’s executive council.
- 33.
Hampaté Bâ (1991, 196–197).
- 34.
The cross drawn at the start of each alphabet explains the popular name croisette (little cross) and Croix-de-par-Dieu (God’s cross) in French, and crisscross (Christ’s cross) row in English.
- 35.
No matter where children work with their parents, be it in town or in the country, it is very difficult to impose punctuality and attentiveness, as J-B de La Salle testified in the seventeenth century, and as appears in UNESCO reports on developing countries in the twenty-first century who are all supporters of ‘modern’ collective and simultaneous education. What is disturbing to the contemporary paradigm is that teaching may be collective (with the teacher in charge of a group of children), while at the same time remaining individual (each pupil working through the same book at their own pace). In the ‘simultaneous mode’, the teacher has a group of pupils working simultaneously on the same page of the book and insists that everyone does the same exercise at the same time.
- 36.
Ibid, 230–231.
- 37.
Modern textbooks are characterized by a progressive study of sounds and how they are written, using specially written texts (/a/: “the cat and the rat ran; the cat ran at the rat”, McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer, New York, American Book Co, 1909, p. 8). Banton Smith (1965 [1934]).
- 38.
- 39.
Hampaté Bâ (1980). Hampâté Bâ considered him his spiritual master and visited him regularly until his death. One could, of course, link this way of teaching, continually analysing and commenting on the same memorised text, to the teaching by Talmudic teachers and medieval school teachers (Carruthers 1990).
- 40.
Yates (1966).
- 41.
Martin Luther, M.L.O., IX, ed. Labor and Fides, Genève, p. 111. After the Peasants’ War (1525–26), Luther did not encourage adults or children to read alone, but only under the supervision of a pastor (Gilmont 2003).
- 42.
The Council of Trent (1545–63) condemned protestant heresies, affirmed the major points of truth in catholic faith and supported the publication of catechisms (Julia 2003).
- 43.
Carruthers (1990, 10).
- 44.
Hall (1996). The Pietists gave a good example of “intensive reading” of the Bible.
- 45.
Wittman (2003).
- 46.
Lyons (1987).
- 47.
Cressy (1980, 29).
- 48.
Chartier (2007, ch. 1 and 2).
- 49.
Edmund Coote, The English Schoole-Master, 1624, quoted in (Cressy 1980, 21).
- 50.
On teaching materials and “reading methods”, Anne-Marie Chartier 2007, op. cit., chapters 5 et 6.
- 51.
The young Romans evoked by Quintilian learned reading and writing in cursive script at the same time and used a bone or metal stylus on a wax tablet, the equivalent of our slates: the wax was heated to erase the copied text.
- 52.
Hadot (2001, 116).
- 53.
Pierre Hadot, ibid., 149.
- 54.
We can give as an example for Christianity in Antiquity: the short treatise on dogmatic theology that is the Apostles’ Creed or Credo. Its wording was modified over time by the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), but it cannot be understood outside its specific uses; catechistic (summaries memorised by each convert), sacramental (formulae spoken during baptisms), liturgical (profession of faith by the congregation at each act of worship).
- 55.
It could have been possible to invoke other models, if the object of the analysis had been learning to read as a process in which the identification of the medium is made impossible to ascertain from the message, by evoking the construction of a habitus (Bourdieu), inculcation devices (Foucault), the assimilation of schema (Piaget), or the internalisation of cultural tools (Vygotski), etc. The term ‘praxis’ employed by Pierre Hadot, instead, puts the focus on what was the object of this analysis: not the ‘process of incorporating’ the texts, but the ‘physical and spiritual’ environment which has made reading exist historically and pedagogically as a mnemonic device.
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Chartier, AM. (2014). The Teaching Context and Reading from the 16th to the 19th Centuries: The Role of the Memorization of Texts in Learning. In: Bernard, A., Proust, C. (eds) Scientific Sources and Teaching Contexts Throughout History: Problems and Perspectives. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 301. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5122-4_2
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