Curriculum: Geraldine E. Rodgers

The Critical Missed Step 

by Geraldine E. Rodgers

As a third-grade teacher, Geraldine E. Rodgers was appalled by the reading inadequacies of the children arriving at third grade after having learned to read with the standard sight-word readers. To study the problem, she took a sabbatical leave in 1977 to observe first graders and to test over 900 of the resultant second graders in their own languages, in the United States, Holland, Sweden, Germany, Austria and France. She found that two dominant and quite different types of readers resulted, from differences in beginning first grade methods. She then spent the following thirty or so years researching the history of the teaching of reading, in the Library of Congress, Harvard University, the British Library in London, and many other sources, and as a result has published a 3-volume history, and four other texts concerning the problem..


"Obviously, the syllable is fundamental in speech. What, then, is the full sequence of steps in producing speech and listening to speech? Since reading should be only a form of listening to speech, and writing should be only a form of producing speech, then the full sequence of steps for the reading and writing of sound-bearing alphabetic print should be the same as for listening to speech and for producing speech. Therefore, what is that necessary background with which to explain those steps that should be the same for both speech and writing?


For thousands of years, the steps for both spoken speech and written speech remained identical and unchanged. That is, they remained identical and unchanged until the so-called Age of Enlightenment which brought with it such “improvements” as the French Revolution. One of those “improvements” from the so-called “Enlightenment” of men such as Voltaire, was a presumed“new” way to teach beginning reading - by the meaning of alphabetically-written whole words instead of by the sound of alphabetically-written isolated syllables. While that French method originated as early as 1719, it did not really become important until after 1744.

Of course, by ignoring the syllable and depending on “meaning”, progress had taken a massive step backwards. Progress went backward to before circa 800 B. C., before the invention of five vowels in Ancient Greece had finally made it possible to write syllable sounds precisely with the even far-more-ancient Egyptian-invented consonants. Some lengthy syllabaries have been invented in history, but none have the incredible efficiency of our short alphabet (presently 26 letters) of consonants plus vowels, with which it is possible, to construct all the syllables necessary to write down any human thought. Yet, after the renewal of the ancient whole-word method for written language, the first step in learning spoken language, the syllable and the syllable tables, were no longer the first step in learning written language."


 https://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/BookDetails/771734-The-Critical-Missed-Step

Rodgers, Geraldine E. The Critical Missed Step . AuthorHouse. Kindle Edition. "