Chapter 3: Elementary Reading Elementary reading is the most basic level, so the authors spent a bit of time talking about efforts in the United States to promote literacy. Based on their description of how "Public officials have declared that the 1970's will be the 'decade of reading'," I was a bit surprised when I checked and the number of illiterate people over age 14 in the US in 1969 was only one percent. By 1979 that number had dropped to six tenths of one percent. When compared to the population, that means about 2,032,119 people over age fourteen couldn't read in 1969 and that dropped to about 1,359,275 by 1979.
They didn't tackle the lowest level very thoroughly, but I was a bit surprised that with their discussion of speed reading they didn't give at least a passing mention to phonics which had a big rise in the 1960s before declining in the 70s and 80s only to see another big uptick in the 90s.
The broad idea of "reading readiness" stemmed from Jean Piaget's work, much of which was debunked by Peter Bryant during the 1970s. Yet we're still apparently discussing it and attempting to figure out how to do all this better: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curriculum-phonics.html
They didn't tackle the lowest level very thoroughly, but I was a bit surprised that with their discussion of speed reading they didn't give at least a passing mention to phonics which had a big rise in the 1960s before declining in the 70s and 80s only to see another big uptick in the 90s.