A Renaissance Read on Phonics

For those who tout phonics as the new hero of the classroom, meet John Brinsley.

Four centuries ago, the London schoolmaster taught children to sound out the letters in similar words--as in “hand” and “band”--to help them recognize the building blocks of language.

The technique, promoted by Brinsley and other top educators of the time, accompanied the birth of literacy among the English masses. It helped vault a nation--and eventually much of the Western world--into the age of the printed word.

That success offers hope to a younger country confronting a literacy crisis among its young, and contains unmistakable parallels between Brinsley’s era and our own.

Educators today stress the importance of preparing children for the demands of a complex world, calling education the surest road to opportunity--ideals advanced in the Renaissance.

Educators today bemoan a system that churns out ill-prepared and underpaid teachers who produce students lacking adequate reading skills--concerns raised by Brinsley and his contemporaries.

Educators today are rediscovering one other lesson: Teaching children to read can be a slow, excruciating endeavor.

“So many of the issues we are concerned with today seem not to be new,” said Mary Robertson, curator of manuscripts at the Huntington Library in San Marino, which is featuring an exhibit on popular reading in Renaissance England. “I’m talking about the importance of literacy, the way to teach it, the value and profit of learning to read.”

Precisely because it is intrinsic to reading, phonics actually has lasted for centuries in one form or another. It dates to the Greeks--surfacing in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, historians say--but did not emerge as an education tool for the masses until after the advent of the printing press around 1455.

The grammar books produced by English educators at the time of Shakespeare contain the seeds of ideas that help children today unlock the secrets of the printed page.

Consider the advice offered by Brinsley for students who entered “grammar school”--about age 9 or 10--without adequate English skills.

The frustrated schoolmaster recommended that teachers review the sounds of letters for students who had failed to learn such basic English in “petty schools” around age 6.

“First the child is to be taught how to call every letter, pronouncing each of them plainly, fully and distinctly,” Brinsley wrote in “The Grammar Schoole” in 1612.

He added: “To make children . . . take a delight in spelling, let them spell many syllables together, which differ . . . but only in one letter [such] as hand, band, land, sand.”

Such ideas pervade modern reading textbooks.

One of the best known, “Open Court,” calls for students to “blend” sounds to create different words, such as “rag, rig, runt, rot.”

Historians are beginning to note the similarities among lessons that bridge 400 years and two nations.

“The standard instructional mode [of Brinsley’s time] was very similar to the one we are promoting today,” said David Cressy, a history professor at Ohio State University and a scholar on literacy in Renaissance England.

Indeed, experts who explore the causes of reading difficulties have confirmed essentially what Brinsley figured out 400 years ago: The primary obstacle to fluent reading rests in an inability to recognize the sounds in language. The new research has triggered changes in classroom instruction and textbooks.

Many teachers now use structured lessons to help children construct words by first breaking down vowels and consonants, and building to more complex letter combinations. The process is known widely as “systematic explicit phonics.”

“From the research, we know the best way to teach beginning reading is directly and sequentially, using a phonics-based method,” said Judith Birsh, a reading disabilities expert at Columbia University.

Yet many teachers still cling to the literature-intensive method of “whole language” that has been at odds with phonics in recent years.

That same technique appeared to play at least an informal role in Brinsley’s time. Children probably absorbed modest skills by listening to the Bible being read aloud, at school and at home.

There was ample opportunity to hear the religious text. Leaders of the Protestant Reformation called for every person, not just members of the clergy, to read the Scriptures.

Although historians have no record of a phonics-versus-whole language feud in Renaissance England, they say the existence of such “oral reading” indicates that children probably learned rudimentary skills through their exposure to literature.

“This debate about how to instruct children to read has gone on since the beginning of literate human time,” said Barbara Foorman, director of the Center for Academic and Reading Skills at the University of Texas.

Historians say the literacy rate in England climbed during this time, estimating that as much as 60% of the population may have gained basic reading abilities during the Renaissance.

The printing press made books widely available and inexpensive, creating a new demand for reading material from pamphlets on beekeeping and gardening to volumes on European exploration.

The Huntington exhibit contains numerous books produced in Renaissance England, including the King James Bible, tracts on health and astronomy, and a “First Folio,” the posthumous edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays. The exhibit runs through August 2000.

“It’s fascinating to see the contemporary slant that so many of these works have,” said Robertson, the curator at the Huntington Library exhibit. “We are constantly rediscovering the past.”

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