How the McGuffey Readers Develop Language and Literacy

In 2025, the United States spent 6 percent of the Gross Domestic Product on education. Since the total GDP was 30.62 trillion dollars, that means the amount we laid out for education in America was a whopping $1,837,280,000,000! (That’s a lot of paychecks for a lot of people needing to make their mortgage payments, meaning this has become a huge part of our economy.)

Schooling in America not only eats up money, it eats up time. It takes six to eight hours a day for 180 days a year, for 13 or more years.

And yet, Johnny still can’t read or write.

We’re not spending money on an education system; we’re funding an indoctrination system bent on stripping us of our mores and dumbing us down.

But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when people demanded excellent education because they were heavily invested in the outcome of their communities and their government.

We can’t go back to those times, but we can capture the spirit of that era and bring it into our present. We can take the best from the past and combine it with the best of our present to change our nation and our world.

Revitalizing education today requires that we go back to the point we jumped off and descended into the abyss of progressive insanity.

You have more power than you think, and it starts right there in your own family.

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In case you are new here, I’m Sherry Hayes, the interesting mom of 15, and I want to share some things with you today that will ADD to your life, not waste your time.

Whether you started homeschooling yesterday or years ago, if you’re serious about your child’s education, this post has something to offer you.

I don’t follow fads or trends, I only share deep, but practical, truths that I’ve gained as I’ve homeschooled our 15 children over 37 years.

Lately, we have been talking about the Four Pillars of excellent education, which are:

Gaining favor with God and Man

The tools and skills for learning

Content

Application

Today, we are beginning our focus on the second pillar, gaining the tools and skills needed for all other learning.

I am going to be presenting the reasons why I trust vintage curriculum to build the foundation of basic language arts skills for the rest of our children’s learning and how I use these materials in general. The next post will be devoted to reading instruction using these materials, and in the third podcast I plan to cover the same for arithmetic.

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I know it sounds crazy, but in 1852, the job of educating children in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic could be done in 12 weeks a year, and, according to the Department of Education, even in the years of 1869-1890, the average school year was only 132 days, or just over five months.

And in those five months basic education was rigorous and more complete than in our times.

How do I know this? Because of books like these:

The above pages are from an original copy of an 1853 McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader. To illustrate the point that schools did more in less time, try reading a little bit of the above passage.

A number of years ago I took the fourth McGuffey’s reader and analyzed it according to our current reading grade levels (using complexity of sentence structure and vocabulary as the criteria).

I was shocked to find that it tested even beyond the ability of most high school seniors (keep in mind that this book was used at what we could consider today as the eighth grade level).

This led me to ask, “Just what are we doing with all of the hours, all of the weeks, all of the months spent in public schooling? And what about all the private schools that follow this same model?”

In my early years as a homeschooling mom, as I was winding my own way back to common sense, I was mostly reacting. Because of voices such as John Taylor Gatto I had many, many “aha” moments, and I knew a million things I DIDN’T want to do with my children.

But I soon found out it’s one thing to react, another thing to ACT.

I needed a more positive direction. And so I discovered unit studies, Dr. Raymond Moore, Ruth Beechick, and Charlotte Mason.

And, as I was trying to follow the recommendations of all of these wonderful people, I found doing much of what they suggested was nearly impossible with multiple children at multiple stages at the same time.

I truly wanted to give my children more time to focus on things such as nature study, handiwork, etc. And I also appreciated the idea of taking an interesting subject and delving deeply into it, but I found that doing all these things was often at the expense of helping my children be good at the basics.

Then, I somehow stumbled on the McGuffey readers and Ray’s arithmetics, and the light was turned on.

In these books I found so much.

Here the Bible was venerated. Here Biblical morality was championed. Here excellent prose and poetry were showcased. Here math was laid out in a clear, simple, applicable way.

And then I knew what I needed to do. I needed to harness these materials so my children would have a solid, unmoving foundation in reading, in good writing, and in the basics of arithmetic. If I could accomplish this in their lives, then they would be able to easily handle the rest.

So, I not only ordered the physical copies via Mott Media and other sources, but I also secured digital copies via Dollar Homeschool.

And I realized I needed to come up with a way to make the most of these texts.

So, I took the best from Charlotte Mason and applied it.

I had my children read a lesson, then narrate and copy, then we had a dictation session. For the older children I also required sentence creation with the vocabulary words listed at the end of the lessons.

We did this for months and months, and I was not certain anything good was happening.

Then I looked at their progress, and it was astounding.

Their ability to read, write, and punctuate was far above their modern grade levels. They could express themselves in writing clearly and easily. Their vocabulary and sentence structure were advanced as well. For most, even their spelling was better (I have a few children who are challenged in this area).

It was all so gradual and seemingly effortless on my part that it was like magic.

Just why was this?

Because this was the intention of the author.

In order to understand this, we need to look at McGuffey himself.

William Holmes McGuffey was born on the frontier of America to a pioneering family. He was first educated at home by his mother, then sent to a school housed in log cabins for a few years.

By the time he was 14, he was teaching large groups of pupils, sometimes for eleven hours a day, often with no textbook other than the family Bible.

There were no teachers’ colleges, no educational philosophers to get in the way.

The students in his schools usually had few hours to spare for learning, so whatever was done had to be as intense and as efficient as possible.

This is the necessity behind the genius of the McGuffey readers. They take the complex task of teaching reading, literature, grammar, etc. and boil it all down until it fits nicely into a set of books small enough to take less than a foot of space on a bookshelf.

In the lesson I just read are all the elements necessary for:

Instruction in proper diction.

Vocabulary

Introduction to excellent literature

Questions for the teacher to ask for better understanding and clarity (what we would today call “reading comprehension”)

Material by which to learn proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling

These books were touted as being the:

BEST AND CHEAPEST SCHOOLBOOKS EVER PUBLISHED.

They were small because there was little space available in covered wagons for books. They had to be inexpensive because money was hard to come by for farmers and pioneers.

And they were so concentrated with usable information that they were like little vitamin pills for the mind and soul.

They were simple and to the point because they were to be used in one-room schoolhouses, with one main teacher for a number of students, usually from the ages of six to 18. There is very little instruction as to how to use them, because instruction at that time was mostly dependent on the ingenuity of the teacher, and also because teaching at that time used a simple structure that was repeated so often it became the default and needed no explanation.

Just what was that structure?

We don’t really know. I have looked into this numerous times and searched for it all over the Internet. There are a few thoughtful papers written, but they are not very specific.

In the end I opted to look at the prefaces to the old readers, especially what McGuffey originally wrote. It was interesting to find that his methods were closely aligned with those of Charlotte Mason, as she seems to have agreed with much of what McGuffey was trying to accomplish across the pond in wild America (even though she was being born about the time McGuffey’s life on earth was ending).

Here’s what I have gathered and been able to put in place in our homeschooling:

Teaching reading via both phonics and sight words. I have done this because it is the only way that makes sense, and the only way which produces children who can read anything they come across.

Using narration, copywork, and dictation as much as possible. Even though these three (along with rote recitation) have been presented as originating with Charlotte Mason, I have discovered they seem to be the constants in all education in human history.

Wherever possible, using quality literary works instead of boring drivel meant exclusively for textbooks. This is close to the recommendation of Charlotte Mason that “living books” be used.

Reserving the teaching of technical grammar until a child is able to read and write fairly well (I do have a system of what I call “gentle grammar” to teach basic writing mechanics that is not jargon-dependent) and then going over it only once (instead of going over the same technical grammar year after year).

Except for teaching some basic phonics-based spelling rules (which you can find in Splendid Spelling), I do not teach spelling separately (dictation, if done correctly, eliminates the need for this).

I keep our concentrated lessons on language arts short, sweet, and to the point. The youngest only need about 15 minutes of instruction with 15 minutes or so of seat work a day, and the older ones only need about one-half to one hour in specific language arts learning (of course, language arts is involved in just about every other subject, isn’t it?).

The results have been amazing.

I regret that I did not discover these old texts earlier, as I only started using them as our sixth child was in his last year or so of schooling. It was our youngest nine children who benefited most from vintage textbooks.

These children have gone on to do quite well in college, with no problem reading, comprehending, and writing excellent papers right off the bat (this shocked them, even, and they were often bored with what is now called “college level”).

Since I don’t want this podcast to go too long, I have decided I have too much information to fit, so I will be spending next podcast on the specifics of language arts instruction via vintage curriculum, especially reading instruction.