Rebecca Smith Pollard, aka Kate Harrington

Summary

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Stuff You Missed in History Class — Rebecca Smith Pollard, aka Kate Harrington

Podcast: Stuff You Missed in History Class
Hosts: Tracy V. Wilson & Holly Fry
Episode Date: June 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the fascinating and complex life of Rebecca Smith Pollard, who wrote under the pen name Kate Harrington. While initially noted for a volume of poetry marking the U.S. centennial, Pollard’s real historical impact stemmed from her pioneering approach to teaching children to read—a method that would influence generations of literacy education in America. Tracy and Holly also dive into Pollard’s controversial novel written as a response to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” situating her work within the fraught cultural and political environment of the 19th century.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rebecca's Origins and Family Background

• Rebecca Smith Pollard was born in Allegheny City, PA, on September 20, 1831.
  • Mother, Marjorie, emigrated from Ireland as a child.
  • Father, Nathaniel Ruggles Smith, Harvard-educated grammar expert, founded what may have been the first literary journal west of the Mississippi. (05:04-05:49)
• Pollard’s early life is obscure; even her middle name is sometimes reported as “Hutchinson” or “Harrington” due to a family naming ambiguity. (05:49)

2. Early Literary Career and Publication

• As a young woman in Kentucky, Rebecca became a teacher and published poems under “Kate Harrington,” often in the Louisville Journal.
  • Noted editor engagement: "We are heartily glad to see you back, dear Kate. You must never play truant so long again." (06:54)
• In 1856, published her first novel, Emma Bartlett or Prejudice and Fanaticism, credited to “R.H. Smith” (07:56)

3. Critical Response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Emma Bartlett was a response to Stowe’s abolitionist novel.
  • Among a wave of “anti-Tom” literature, her novel critiqued both abolitionism and anti-immigrant “Know Nothingism.” (09:30)
• Strong anti-abolitionist stance: “She apparently thought abolitionism was just as bad [as Know Nothingism].” (11:13, Tracy)
• Illustrative quote from the novel, questioning abolitionist motives and suggesting accounts of southern brutality were "overblown or even fabricated." (11:13)
• Holly adds: "We’re not saying that depicting something in a book is the same as believing or endorsing it... But this book was explicitly written for political reasons." (12:14)
• The preface frames it as “facts in fiction,” promoting constitutional upholding and Union preservation (12:14)
• In the second edition, Pollard writes: “there is neither reason, religion nor justice in crushing the white man in order to liberate the blacks from a bondage in which they have been placed by circumstances which no ordinary foresight of man and no ordinary exercise of humanity could have prevented.” (13:03)
• Holly, lamenting: “Once again, I say, oh, Rebecca.” (13:49)

4. Personal Life and Poetry

• Married poet and newspaper editor Oliver I. Taylor in 1858; he died of typhoid two years later. (19:27)
• Remarried to James Pollard. Experienced personal tragedy with the death of her daughter, memorialized in In Memoriam Mamie, April 6, 1869—which moved Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to tears. (20:15)
• Her 1876 volume Centennial and Other Poems included patriotic works and reflections on the divided post-Civil War nation.
  • Noteworthy line aimed at national reconciliation: "Remembering 'mong patriots departed, no line parts the gray from the blue." (22:04-22:58)

5. Innovative Educator and Patent Holder

• Ran girls’ schools in Iowa, notably incorporating hands-on, interactive teaching—and relying less on rote memorization.
  • Activities included reenactments, using apples for fractions, and a classroom garden. (23:45)
• Awarded an 1887 patent for an educational device that allowed manipulation of letters to form word families. (24:15)
  • Example activity: rotating letter plates to make “sat, rat, pat, mat.” (24:56)
• Advocated for synthetic phonics as fundamental to reading—a key position amidst the era’s “reading wars.” (25:31)

6. The Reading Wars: Whole Word vs. Phonics

• Overview of the historical debate:
  • Early American readers like Noah Webster used phonics.
  • Mid-19th century, push for “whole word” or “look-say” methods, advocated by reformers like Thomas Gallaudet and Horace Mann, became dominant. (27:03-28:40)
  • Pollard’s method brought phonics systems back into classrooms, specifically with her 1889 Synthetic Reader, Speller, and Manual—a novel, comprehensive, and influential approach. (33:26)
  • “Instead of teaching the word as a whole and afterwards subjecting it to phonic analysis, is it not infinitely better to take the sounds of the letters for our starting point, and with those sounds lay a foundation...?” — Pollard, from her teacher’s manual (33:31)
• Practical classroom details:
  • “Busywork” included drawing phonics wheels and ladders, marking up textbooks with diacritics, and incorporating creative activities (drawing, singing) to reinforce phonics. (34:35)
  • She was among the first to integrate spellers, readers, and manuals as a single system, with graded advancement and textbook marking (controversial at the time). (37:10)

7. Professional Recognition and Critiques

• Widely adopted in late 19th/early 20th centuries, praised by reviewers for promoting both accuracy and scientific thinking.
  • Example: “We would like to have our own children taught by this system and we hope to secure the introduction of this book in the schools attended by them.” — Education journal review (1897, 38:57)
• Not without critics: Edmund Burke Huey found her method “intensely artificial and adult in its conceptions and destructive of right habits of reading…” (39:32)

8. Later Life, Faith, and Legacy

• Continued writing hymns in later years, demonstrated interfaith sympathy (especially toward Catholics), and reported an episode where nuns’ prayers—rather than a doctor—cured her inflamed eyes. (40:08)
• Lost her eyesight toward the end of her life; wrote her last poem, “Althea or the Morning Glory,” at age 80, reflecting on faith and mortality. (41:36)
• Died in 1917 at 85; buried in Iowa, commemorated as both Rebecca Smith Pollard and “Kate Harrington.” (41:36)

9. The Continuing Debate on Reading Instruction

• After Pollard’s death, the pendulum swung back to whole word methods, then to phonics (1950s), then whole language (1980s), and “balanced literacy” (1990s).
  • Ongoing “reading wars” characterized by repeated shifts and public debate. (42:06-43:57)
• Today, there’s a movement toward the “Science of Reading”—evidence-based methods emphasizing phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension—but implementation and emphasis remain controversial and varied. (43:57)
• Contemporary challenges in literacy:
  • Recent critiques note that current methods may overemphasize decoding at the expense of higher literacy skills, with societal, technological, and educational shifts (e.g., smartphone use, AI, shift from full texts to short excerpts) also implicated. (44:47-45:34)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Emma Bartlett and Anti-Abolitionism:

• “She apparently thought abolitionism was just as bad [as Know Nothingism].” — Tracy (11:13)
• “Once again, I say, oh, Rebecca.” — Holly (13:49)

On Phonics and Her Teaching Philosophy:

• “Instead of teaching the word as a whole and afterwards subjecting it to phonic analysis, is it not infinitely better to take the sounds of the letters for our starting point, and with those sounds lay a foundation, firm and broad, upon which we can build whole families of words for instant recognition?” — Pollard, Synthetic Method of Reading and Spelling (33:31)
• “Why should not something be used to awaken and hold the interest of children in the drudgery of the first lessons in reading?” — Pollard (34:35)

Critiques and Reviews:

• “We would like to have our own children taught by this system and we hope to secure the introduction of this book in the schools attended by them. We commend it to all teachers.” — Education journal, 1897 (38:57)
• “Intensely artificial and adult in its conceptions and destructive of right habits of reading…” — Edmund Burke Huey (39:32)

On the Modern Literacy Crisis:

• “Some systems that are framed as science of reading feel like that's just the phonics part and not all of this other part... That is just one component of what is being described as a literacy crisis in the US.” — Tracy (44:47)
• “There has been a lot of debate about all of this in recent decades. It’s things that are having a clear impact in how students are taught and how society functions as people are or are not able to read and make sense out of information.” — Tracy (45:34)

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Timeline of Key Segments

• 03:07 — Introduction & episode setup
• 05:04 — Rebecca’s family and early life
• 06:54 — Early literary career under “Kate Harrington”
• 07:56 — Publication & motivation of Emma Bartlett
• 09:30–15:30 — Discussion of anti-Tom literature and Pollard’s political opinions
• 19:27 — Marriages, personal loss, and poetic tributes
• 23:45 — Innovative teaching methods
• 24:15 — Educational device patent
• 25:49–29:15 — Historical shifts in reading pedagogy (“reading wars”)
• 33:26–36:36 — Pollard’s synthetic method, classroom techniques
• 37:50–39:32 — Adoption and critique of Pollard’s method
• 40:08 — Interfaith connections, later writings
• 41:36 — Final years and death
• 42:06–45:34 — The ongoing reading wars and present-day literacy issues

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Tone and Speaker Notes

• Tracy and Holly maintain their typical blend of warmth, wry humor, and scholarly curiosity—especially important when surfacing the challenging or uncomfortable elements of Pollard’s biography.
• They’re forthright about the unpleasant political content of Pollard’s early work, expressing respectful but unequivocal criticism without sensationalism.
• The technical discussions of reading pedagogy are clear, engaging, and grounded in the context of broader educational debates, past and present.

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Summary

Rebecca Smith Pollard—best remembered as “Kate Harrington”—was a complex figure: a teacher-innovator, a poet, and a controversial novelist. While her stance on abolitionism situates her on the wrong side of moral and historical consensus, her pedagogical work anticipated future movements in literacy education, embodying both the promise and perpetual contest of the American classroom. With characteristic thoughtfulness, Tracy and Holly situate Pollard’s legacy in the centuries-spanning “reading wars,” connecting 19th-century debates to live controversies in how children are taught—and how society defines what it means to be literate.

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Transcript

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[Holly Fry]

Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Sometime last year, some folks here at work asked if we had anything planned for the show to go along with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that's being celebrated this year. I think it is safe to say that there is not a year in which either of us would really be interested in the kind of like over the top patriotism and national pride that is usually expected to go along with that kind of a milestone observance. We especially were not in the mood for that when we were asked 2025. I did though go looking around to see if there was anything that was kind of more off the beaten path that might spark my interest. And also let us say to the folks at work, yes, there will be something related on the calendar. Our recent episode on Casimir Pulaski unrelated to that conversation, that was just a coincidence. Somehow in my search for something that would let us say, yes, we do have something on the calendar, I found Rebecca Smith Pollard, who also published under the name Kate Harrington, and her connection to the US Semiquincentennial is that she published a book of poems to mark the U.S. centennial in 1876. That is not much of a connection. And this episode's also mostly not about that, because Rebecca Smith Pollard's major influence was not this book of poems that she published. It was creating a method for teaching children to read that was really influential in her time and still has relevance today. She also wrote a novel that was meant in part as a critical response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. So we're going to be talking about that as well.

[Holly Fry]

Rebecca Harrington Smith was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania on September 20, 1831. Her mother, Marjorie, was born in Ireland and immigrated to the US with her family when she was a child. Rebecca's father, Nathaniel Ruggles Smith, was born in Massachusetts, went to Harvard, and then became a teacher, mostly in private schools, he liked to teach the works of Shakespeare, and he wrote his own grammar and spelling books. A grammar textbook by Samuel Kirkham described Nathaniel Ruggles Smith as a, quote, distinguished and acute grammarian. Nathaniel also established and edited a literary journal called the Hesperus, and Rebecca was their youngest child.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, that literary journal was apparently one of the first, if not the first, literary journals published west of the Mississippi. It's been a running theme on the show lately that we don't know much about people's early lives, but we don't know much about Rebecca's early life. There's even some uncertainty about her middle name. A couple of sources I found gave it as Hutchinson rather than Harrington. I'm not totally sure, but I think this is because she had an older sister named Rebecca Hutchinson who only lived for a few months. And that was the year before this Rebecca was born. At some point, the Smith family moved west. First they moved to Ohio and then to Kentucky. Apparently this move is because Marjorie was ill and they hoped that the change of climate would help her. It's hard to say what impact this had, but from what I was able to piece together, Marjorie smith lived until 1872, when she died at the age of 84. She outlived Rebecca's father, who died in 1859 at the age of 75.

[Holly Fry]

While living in Kentucky, Rebecca became a teacher, and she also started publishing her writing. She published poems in the Louisville Journal under the name Kate Harrington, often with a notation of Prairie Cottage and the year the poem was written. At the end, in 1854, she and another poet, Miss M.E. wilson of Maysville, Kentucky, in each wrote a poem called Moonlight Tryst that was inscribed to the other. These were published in the Journal together with a note from the editor saying that two of our romantic young poetesses, living more than a thousand miles apart, made a covenant to meet in spirit on a particular night and talk to each other in poetry. When Kate Harrington didn't submit anything to the paper for a while in 1855, her next poem appeared with this note from the editor. We are heartily glad to see you back, dear Kate. You must never play truant so long again. She also published essays in other newspapers around Kentucky.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Sometime in the mid-1850s, the family moved to Iowa, and in 1856, Rebecca published a novel titled Emma Bartlett or Prejudice and Fanaticism. The title page said that it was by an American lady, but the copyright statement lists it as the work of R.H. smith, in the words of a review in the Ohio Statesman Quote. The heroine, Emma Bartlett, is the offspring of a young and lively German woman who is driven with her relatives by political and religious persecution from her own land to seek a home in America. She illustrates, through a succession of thrilling scenes the character of a gentle, noble and gifted woman suffering from the evils with which a corrupt social system and an unwise and unjust prescription have surrounded her.

[Holly Fry]

So, as Tracy mentioned at the top of the show, this book was written, at least in part, as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published in book form in 1852 and became a bestseller. Uncle Tom's Cabin, of course, has its own very complicated legacy. Among other things, it was straightforwardly anti slavery and is credited with sparking a surge in abolitionist sentiment in the US but it also depicted black people in a very heavily stereotyped way. And Uncle Tom became an insult to describe black people who were perceived as subservient or complicit in their own oppression.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

At least 30 novels were written in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which are often grouped together under the umbrella of anti Tom literature. At least a third of these novels were by women and they were mostly written by writers living in the South. A lot of anti Tom novels were explicitly pro slavery. I did not read this entire book, but I did read selections from it. And Emma Bartlett has kind of a broader focus than that. In the words of a piece in the Weekly Courier of Ottumwa, Iowa, it was qu designed to illustrate the evils of abolitionism and Know nothingism. The review from the Ohio Statesman that we read from earlier described the book as exposing political and religious prejudice and fanaticism as seen in abolitionism, know Nothingism and kindred heresies.

[Holly Fry]

Abolitionism was obviously the abolition of slavery. The Know Nothing Party was an anti immigrant and anti Catholic political party that flourished in the 1850s. Its name purportedly came from the idea that if members were asked about any nativist organizations they belonged to, they would say they knew nothing. Smith does not seem to have been Catholic herself. Her family were Presbyterians. But she was sympathetic toward Catholics and opposed to the anti Catholic prejudice that was widespread in the 19th century. Some of this prejudice was connected to the influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland who were fleeing the great great famine that started in the 1840s.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So Smith wrote this novel to expose know Nothingism as evil and she apparently thought abolitionism was just as bad. The book's abolitionist characters are hypocrites and they have self serving motivations. There are Rebuttals against abolitionist arguments scattered throughout conversations that take place among the various characters. Like, at one point, someone describes the idea of people as property as shocking, and the response is, quote, and yet who first brought them into a position to be sold as such? Was it not the inhabitants of that portion of the globe whose descendants are now continually crying against the sin of slavery? Good gracious. Another conversation frames accounts of brutality being carried out on southern plantations as overblown or even fabricated. Basically the same kind of nonsense that still is in Internet comment sections today.

[Holly Fry]

We're not saying that depicting something in a book is the same as believing or endorsing it. Plenty of writers depict evil or prejudice or violence in their books without it being an expression of their own beliefs or tendencies. But this book was explicitly written for political reasons. It is dedicated to the, quote, true upholders of the Constitution and of the firm supporters of our glorious Union. The preface to the first edition said that she, quote, endeavored to present some facts in fiction. Just shaking my head no, oh, Rebecca,

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I didn't know any of this when I picked her.

[Holly Fry]

That's what makes it good. That's what makes it a good thing to discuss.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In the introduction to the second edition of the novel, Smith described it as demonstrating, quote, two or three notions which have of late grown to the importance of political doctrines to be great political and social evils. The two chief conclusions which she thought these facts established were that a fellow creature's place of birth should not be made the test of his capabilities or intrinsic worth, and that there is neither reason, religion nor justice in crushing the white man in order to liberate the blacks from a bondage in which they have been placed by circumstances which no ordinary foresight of man and no ordinary exercise of humanity could have prevented.

[Holly Fry]

Once again, I say, oh, Rebecca. In this book and other writings, Smith was also deeply opposed to the idea of dissolving the Union over the issue of slavery. That's one of the reasons that she framed abolitionism as a fanatical evil. She thought that the abolitionists were forcing the country toward a civil war. Near the end of Emma Bartlett, a character even recites a five stanza poem that argues stridently against dissevering the Union.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Unfortunately, this book, which was written when she was 25, is the biggest example we have of Rebecca Smith Pollard's thoughts on this. I looked through newspapers for other stories or essays or poems that she might have written later on to see if they revealed anything in how or whether her opinions might have evolved during and after the Civil War, and I really did not find all that much. Her 1876 book Centennial and Other Poems does include a dirge for Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and one of the founders of the Republican Party. He was deeply opposed to compromising over the issue of slavery in the lead up to the Civil War. So this poem describes Greeley, who was one of the people who worked to convince Abraham Lincoln to commit to ending slavery with the Civil War, as a spirit who, quote, so nobly endeavored to save from disunion the land of the free. So does this poem mean that she came to see slaveholders as the threat to the Union rather than abolitionists? I really cannot say.

[Holly Fry]

I have theories. See you Friday. We will get to her work as an educator after a sponsor break.

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

On April 6, 1858, Rebecca Harrington Smith married poet and newspaper editor Oliver I. Taylor. An announcement of their marriage in the Louisville Journal described Rebecca as having, quote, achieved considerable eminence in the literary world. On their wedding anniversary a year later, they welcomed a daughter named Mary.

[Holly Fry]

Sadly, Oliver died of typhoid in 1860. Two years later, Rebecca married James Pollard, who was elected to the Iowa State Senate that year. James had four children from a previous marriage, and he and Rebecca had three surviving children, Adelaide, Eleanor and Joseph Addison Smith Pollard. Most written mentions of Joseph refer to him by his initials, J.A.S.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

in 1870, Pollard published a book of poetry under the name Kate Harrington. It was called in memoriam Mamie, April 6, 1869. It was in memory of her daughter Mary, who died on that date, which was her 10th birthday and the anniversary of Rebecca's wedding to Mary's late father. This was a series of poems that were written for her daughter, but also to any other mother who had loved and lost a child. It matters little what her station proved, or of what nation, race or tribe she'd be. I'll place her sympathy beyond all price. I'll give her confidence and perfect trust. Such friendship, true and strong, as never dies, but lives when lips that pledge it turn to dust. Pollard apparently had an ongoing correspondence with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote to her that this collection brought tears to his eyes. I found references to this in writing about Pollard, but I did not find the actual letter.

[Holly Fry]

Pollard's book Centennial and Other Poems came out in 1876, also published under the name Kate Harrington. This collection starts with Iowa's Centennial poem, which is a patriotic poem celebrating the American Revolution. Of course, Iowa was not really part of the Revolution at the time. What is now Iowa was claimed by Spain and not Britain. This poem starts out describing Iowa as a barren, wild a hundred years before, home only to indigenous people, who she refers to as the Red man. But it goes, quote, we share the nation's glory too by holding to the world's broad view our men of mark, our genius rare, Scattered like sunbeams everywhere.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The United States Centennial took place just a decade after the official end of the Civil War. So this was near the end of the Reconstruction era, and federal troops were still stationed in South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. So for some people, this was a strange and difficult time to be celebrating a national centennial. The country still seemed very divided. A lot of ways it was becoming more divided. This poem alludes to this calling for, quote, prodigal sons to return and to be given a generous welcome and to, quote, give them robes of a right royal hue. Let the rings that restore them be offered by victors who honor the blue. The poem ends, quote, we ask you to pledge them true hearted a covenant promise anew remembering mong patriots departed no line parts the gray from the blue.

[Holly Fry]

Centennial and Other Poems also includes poems to and about members of Pollard's family, including her late daughter. A memorial to William G. Belknap, son of Grant's Secretary of War, William Worth Belknap, a temperance poem, some nature poems, and some poems that were written by her late father.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In addition to writing poetry, Pollard continued to work as a teacher, mainly at schools for girls, including in Keokuk, Iowa. That's a school that she ran from 1875 to 1877. It seems like she and her husband James were separated by 1877, so especially after that her teaching and her writing would have been really necessary to support herself and her children. James died in 1902.

[Holly Fry]

It seems like Pollard was ahead of her time as a teacher. 19th century schools often involved a lot of learning by rote and strict discipline, but she taught hands on history lessons with her students, dressing up and reenacting battles. She cut up apples to help students learn about fractions and she had a classroom garden outside of the school. Part of the lesson involved pulling up some of the plants at different stages of their development to see how they grew.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1887, Pollard was awarded a patent under the name R.S. pollard. This was for an educational appliance and here's how the patent described this invention. Quote Two or more plates connected together and shifting upon or within each other, and having upon their faces series of characters which upon a proper shifting of the plates form and convey to the eye and mind different impressions, meanings and objects which singly or improperly grouped they do not indicate whereby the mind of a student is trained by the constructive and synthetic methods in the formation of objects, characters and the language.

[Holly Fry]

In one of the accompanying illustrations, one of the plates is a ring with a series of letters written on it like S, R, P and M. The other plate is in the middle and it has the letters A through T. So by turning that outer ring you can see how these letters combine to form words sat, rat, pat and mat. Another illustration shows this setup being used for arithmetic. These devices would be made from blackboard or something else that could be erased so that a teacher could prepare the board to go along with whatever the day's lessons were.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Pollard had started teaching back when she was living with her parents in Kentucky, so at this point she had at least two decades of experience as a teacher. She also had her father's example as a teacher and she had decided that teaching children phonics was critical to their learning to read.

[Holly Fry]

This was right in the middle of a centuries long debate in the United States about how best to teach children to read. The idea of teaching children through phonics very basically meaning the relationship between letters and the sounds that they make goes back to at least the 16th century when the first formal schools started to be established in North America. Children were typically taught the Alphabet and the sounds made by each letter. Students put that into practice by reading the Bible or historic or political texts. Since there were no textbooks made specifically for children until the 17th century, I

[Tracy V. Wilson]

will just say I did not look into the history of reading education outside of the United States at all for this episode, so we are not going to be talking about that. Some of the earliest reading and spelling textbooks in North America were phonics based. Those included Noah Webster's the Americans Spelling Book, also called the Blue Backed Speller, which came out in 1783. He also released a grammar in 1784 and a reader in 1785. We talked about Webster and his influence more in our two parter on the Dictionary wars, which came out in June of 2023.

[Holly Fry]

In the mid-1800s, school started moving away from phonics in favor of a method that focused on learning whole words or the look say method. One advocate of this was Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder of the first American school for the Deaf and namesake of Gallaudet University. In his book the Mother's Primer to Teach Her Child its Letters, he wrote quote, in the common modes, what could be more uninteresting than to commence with teaching a child to call certain arbitrary marks or letters which in themselves have no meaning, by certain arbitrary sounds or names of the letters which also have no meaning? What an unintelligible and irksome task it must be.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So Gallaudet's method paired words with pictures like a picture of a cat, along with the word cat, so that the student could learn that whole word rather than its component letters. This method probably made a lot of sense to Gallaudet because of his work with deaf and hard of hearing students who either couldn't hear the sounds that were made by different letters and letter combinations, or couldn't hear them very well. But this method did not provide a way for students to decode written words that they didn't already know, other than to try to work it out from context or maybe from illustrations that might be on the page. The first books designed for this method also only went up to the third grade, and by necessity they were focused on words for concrete objects and concepts that can be illustrated, so consequently their vocabulary was kind of limited.

[Holly Fry]

The Mother's Primer was written for the parents of hearing students, and Starting in the 1840s, Gallaudet's method was popularized outside of schools for the deaf in part by educational reformer Horace Mann. Mann advocated teaching children to read by focusing on whole words and only after that to focus on the Alphabet and spelling. This whole word model was fiercely debated among educators, but in the later part of the 19th century it gradually became more widely used than phonics based instruction in the United States.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So that brings us back to Rebecca Smith Pollard in the late 1880s. So about 40 years after Horace Mann started popularizing the look say method, she created a whole system for teaching reading, including a reader, a speller, and a teacher's manual. And it was based on phonics, which we will talk more about after a sponsor break.

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1889, Rebecca Smith Pollard published her first synthetic reader, Synthetic Speller and a Complete manual, Pollard's Synthetic Method of Reading and and Spelling, which was a step by step guide for teachers on how to use the other two books with their students, she wrote in the preface to the manual quote, instead of teaching the word as a whole and afterwards subjecting it to phonic analysis, is it not infinitely better to take the sounds of the letters for our starting point, and with those sounds lay a foundation, firm and broad, upon which we can build whole families of words for instant recognition?

[Holly Fry]

Her method included what she referred to as busywork, in which children practice sounding out letters or drew ladders that were used to illustrate the progression of tones that different vowels could make, or drew wheels with a sound in the center and a spoke for each word that can be made by adding a letter to that sound. She described these as families. So, for example, the ot the OT family included words like like pot, taught, rot, and caught.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

There was a lot of busy work. Those are just examples. But Pollard also acknowledged the need to make things fun, incorporating drawing and sketching and singing to illustrate different concepts. In the preface she wrote, quote, why should not something be used to awaken and hold the interest of children in the drudgery of the first lessons in reading? Are not splints, balls, toothpicks, clay and sand work used for this purpose in teaching the first priests principles of arithmetic and geography. Every intelligent teacher knows when the developing mind of the child no longer needs these devices or helps in the last named branches. Why should there be any question as to when the devices of this method have served their purpose?

[Holly Fry]

Pollard's method of teaching phonics involved focusing on the 26 letters of the Alphabet and all the different sounds they can be used to represent students. Textbooks were illustrated to help students remember sounds associated with different letters. Like RR was shown next to a growling dog while H was next to a panting dog. Stories incorporated the words and sounds that were the focus of a particular lesson, and these became more advanced over time. So lesson one in Pollard's synthetic first reader focused on single syllable words that rhymed with hats, can, or bag, while the first lesson in the second reader is focused on words ending in ing as well as talk, walk each piece, and square.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

These textbooks sorted the letters into vowels and consonants and then sorted the consonant sounds into subvocals or voiced consonants and aspirates or whispers. She also described sounds as labial, lingual, dental, guttural, and pure aspirate, depending on where in the mouth each sound was formed. After learning the letters and these sounds, students could move on to learning combinations of sounds like digraphs and trigraphs.

[Holly Fry]

Pollard's books also included tables of all the diacritical marks and the sounds they corresponded to. The busy work included having students mark their textbooks with diacritical marks corresponding to the sounds made by each letter in each word. This was controversial both because people objected to the idea of students writing in books and because people thought this busy work was tedious. Pollard later suggested having students make their marks on a piece of transparent material so the book itself remained unmarked Pollard

[Tracy V. Wilson]

did not invent the idea of teaching phonics. As we said, a lot of the earliest reading textbooks for children in the United States were phonics based until the field of teaching had moved toward a whole word approach. But she was one of the first to combine spelling and reading books with a teacher's manual so that everything went together. She also developed literature readers that became gradually more advanced for children to move on to after they had mastered the basics. She developed all of this material over the course of about eight years with the help of her daughter Adelaide, who had also become a teacher and also wrote hymns.

[Holly Fry]

Pollard's phonics based reading instruction became really influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her system was used all over the country and multiple other textbook writers took inspiration from her. A review of Pollard's Advanced Speller appeared in the journal education in 1897. The reviewer wrote, quote, this book teaches the pupil to spell, which is its great merit. The need of such a book is made painfully evident by the newspapers, the books and the business letters that one reads. Bad spelling is a fault of our busy, hurried American life. The author of this volume has done much to correct this fault. We believe in her system. It teaches its students to think as well as to write and speak correctly. It teaches him to note accurately the component parts of a word to form a scientific opinion as to its proper pronunciation. We would like to have our own children taught by this system and we hope to secure the introduction of this book in the schools attended by them. We commend it to all teachers.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Proponents of Pollard's method included Edward Everett Hale, who was an advocate of education for the freed people and of the Chautauqua adult education movement in the history and pedagogy of reading. With a review of the History of Reading and Writing and of Methods and Tactics, Texts and Hygiene in Reading, which came out in 1915. Edmund Burke Huey wrote of Pollard's method, quote, the main business of the method is to make the child able to pronounce words for himself as he comes to them in reading new matter. And it accomplishes this result pretty effectually.

[Holly Fry]

Huey also described the method as having been worked out with care and completeness and as successful at getting children to learn word structure and word calling or recognizing and calling out the words. But he didn't praise Pollard's method across the board. He also described it as, quote, intensely artificial and adult in its conceptions and destructive of right habits of reading and of using language generally. He was also of the opinion that working up from phonetic elements to words to ideas to sentences, as the opposite of how the mind naturally works.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In her later years, Rebecca Smith Pollard wrote a number of religious hymns. And in 1891, she wrote a letter to George T. Angell, founder and first president of the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, noting, quote, the kindly mention you frequently make of our Catholic friends. So Pollard, based on the way angel had written about Catholics, thought that he might appreciate an experience she'd had while traveling to train teachers to use her reading methods. That included visiting a lot of convents to train the nuns who taught in Catholic schools. She said she had been dealing with an eye inflammation for some time during one of these visits, and one of the Catholic mothers told her not to go to the doctor yet, but that they would have all 1100 children in their schools pray for her. Quote. What wonder that the shadows lifted, the clouds dispersed, and that ere the week had ended there was not to dim my vision, save the grateful tears which I could not banish when I remembered how quickly the loving Savior responded to the children's calls.

[Holly Fry]

Pollard's last published poem was called Althea or the Morning Glory, and it came out in 1912 when she was 80. Unlike most of her earlier poetry work, she published it under her own name, Rebecca S. Pollard. It's a long poem, it's more than 30 pages, and it's a meditation on faith and mortality with a lot of flower imagery.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Rebecca Smith Pollard lost most of her eyesight toward the end of her life. She spent the last years of her life living with her son in Fort Madison, Iowa. She died there on May 29, 1917, at the age of 85. A poem she had written several years earlier but had never published, titled Heaven, was read. At her funeral, she was buried at Farmington Cemetery with a marker that says Rebecca Smith Pollard, and then under that in quotation marks, Kate Harrington.

[Holly Fry]

Around the time of Pollard's death, phonics started to fall out of favor again in the United States, with reading instruction once again moving back to focus on whole words. Then in 1955, Rudolph Flesch's book why Johnny Can't Read, criticized the abandonment of phonics, which led to another resurgence in phonics based instruction. Then that shifted once again with a move toward whole language instruction in the 1980s, and, and then the evolution of balanced literacy in the 1990s. This back and forth is sometimes characterized as the reading wars.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, I would say both the back and forth and the discussion around the back and forth has been characterized as The Reading Wars Balanced literacy has been described as kind of a happy medium between phonics and whole word instruction, taking the best parts of each of them. But there has also been a lot of variation and exactly what's involved in different methods that have been under this umbrella of balanced literacy. Some of its critics described balanced literacy as mainly a variation on whole word instruction without enough phonics. Most recently, the idea of three cueing that is part of some balanced literacy systems has come under really heavy criticism. 3 Cueing involves trying to figure out the meanings of unfamiliar words based on context clues or pictures, or making guess based on the sound made by the first letter, rather than teaching children how to sound out or decode unfamiliar words. A lot of public interest and criticism of this followed reporting by Emily Hanford at American Public Media and then a podcast that came out of that reporting called Sold a story in 2022.

[Holly Fry]

Today in the US there's been a growing movement toward the science of reading, which bases reading instruction on techniques that can be backed by scientific evidence of their efficacy. Broadly speaking, phonics and phonemic awareness are two components of the science of reading, which also includes multiple other elements like vocabulary and reading comprehension, because being able to sound out the word based on its letters or phonemes is only one step in the process of understanding what something means. The science of reading isn't a program for reading instruction, though. It's more of a body of research into reading and literacy and the use of that research to guide programs that teach reading. And there is still, of course, a ton of controversy around exactly how best to implement all of this research.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. I have seen a number of discussions among teachers and other people who work in education who feel like some. Some systems that are framed as science of reading feel like that. That's just the phonics part and not all of this other part that is also necessary to really being able to read. And this part, being able to figure out what. What individual words are if you're not familiar with them or even if you are. That is just one component of what is being described as a literacy crisis in the US After I finished this whole outline, like, first thing this morning, I saw an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that talked about other factors contributing to this literacy crisis, including smartphones.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Which the author of this article was like. I was kind of a naysayer and thinking smartphones were a problem. But there is a growing body of evidence that smartphones really are playing a role. Other factors were early reliance on AI chatbots to try to get information and a shift in the way, not just like the reading of words is taught, but once you get into reading pieces of work, a shift away from reading complete works to instead trying to get core pieces of information from very short excerpts. So instead of reading the entirety of a novel, reading a small amount of it and testing comprehension of that small amount, which sort of has left people getting into high school and college without sort of the reading stamina to read whole long works and analyze and follow them. We obviously are not teachers, we do not have hands on experience with all of this, but it is clear that there has been a lot of debate about all of this in recent decades. It's things that are having a clear impact in how students are taught and how society functions as people are or are not able to read and make sense out of information. So that's Rebecca Smith Pollard, ahead of her time in some ways but not others.

[Holly Fry]

Do you want to read and make sense out of some listener mail?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yes. This is kind of funny that we're talking about reading comprehension because I had to ask Holly earlier if she remembered me reading this email already. We don't think I read this email already, but apologies if I have read it twice. This is from Ellen. Ellen wrote another vote for Lovecadi O'Hearn and wrote Dear Holly and Tracy, I started listening to your podcast when I had a very long commute to a job was giving me insomnia and panic attacks. I was working for a very critical supervisor. I'm just gonna skip ahead and say having a really rough time. And I remember when I read this email the first time I got very choked up at the nap. Next part in which Ellen said, I especially appreciated your Friday blessing when you tell us all that you hope we have a restful weekend and do something that makes us happy. I want you to know how meaningful that little kindness was to me during that time. Now thankfully I have a much better job but still do a lot of driving, so I often have thoughts. Velveteen Rabbit, Philip Glass Embroidery. They have not yet made it into an email, but when I was listening to the Elizabeth Bisland episode and heard the name Lafcadio Hearn, I thought that name sound familiar. As he went on I remembered I have a book by him. Back in the early 1990s my mother gave me his book Some Chinese Ghosts after I returned from living in Taiwan for a couple of years. She knew I was enjoying reading the sort of weird old books you find in used book sales. This book was published in 1887 and my copy is a reprint by the Modern Library from 1927. The Intro to this volume is a short bio of Hearn written in such an entertaining and old fashioned style I decided to to scan it and attach it for you. While his whole life story is extremely interesting, the book itself is a pretty rough read. It's full of Chinese transliterations, Victorian Orientalism and lofty prose. Sounds about right. According to his bio, this book was typical of his strange genius and he considered it, quote, an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph someday. Poetical prose. Poor Lafcadio. He was not a very good judge of what people in the future would like to read. Maybe he will be a good candidate for a Halloween episode because apparently, apparently quote, he gives the reader a ghostly shudder by building up an intimacy with the unseen. I will pause to say I have him like as a potential October topic for that reason. To return to the email, since embroidery was also a recent topic, I'm sending you a photo of my first needlepoint project, which I inherited unfinished from my husband's grandmother. She had started it as a wedding present for me and had finished about a third of it when she passed away. I had never done needlepoint before, but it was such a beautiful pattern based on an artwork by Mucha that I decided to try it. After all, needlepoint is just one stitch. How hard can it be? Well, it ended up taking four years to finish it as it is quite large, but since then I've completed several much smaller projects and even learned to do more than one stitch as pet tacks. Here is a photo of our grand Tortoise. He is a Russian tortoise named Ivan the Turtle. He loves to go outside and dig in the garden and is fond of eating snowdrops, dianthus, and petunias when he can reach them. Thank you so much for your podcast and especially for being your lovely, smart, kind, unique selves. You make me feel better about the world. Best wishes, Ellen. I want the email to show me the blocked content. Oh my goodness. We have a little tortoise out in the yard looking at what appears to be a small ceramic statue of a bunny. Adorable. Incredibly cute. And this needlepoint is really lovely. I don't even know how to describe it, but it's beautiful and it's lovely that you finished all of that.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, I love that conceptually very much.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. I am sorry for the loss of your husband's grandmother who had passed away while working on this. Anyway, beautiful. What a great email. So thank you again Ellen for this email and for the PDF from some Chinese ghosts and these beautiful pictures. It's beautiful story. If you would like to send us a note we're at history [e-mail] if you would like to see our show notes with all of the sources for the episode including Oliver Beck Smith Pollard's work that we talked about that is at our website which is missinhistory.com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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