A Primer on Primers: How Children Were Taught to Read, 1800 to 1950

Abstract

Blending my professional interest in beginning readers with the opportunity to spend a month at the Baldwin Collection of Historical Children’s Literature at the Smathers Library, University of Florida, Gainesville, I chose to examine the collection’s extensive holdings of primers and other books designed to help children learn to read.

I selected 1800 as a starting point as the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed the beginnings of a changed attitude toward children, their literature, and methods of learning to read. A number of enlightened philosophies would influence how children were taught to read into the next century.