For about a hundred years, most American kids learned to read from the same books.
They were called McGuffey's Readers, and between 1836 and 1960 they sold around 120 million copies. In fact, the only books that outsold them were the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.
Teddy Roosevelt learned to read from them. Henry Ford did too. So did the Wright brothers.
They represent the standard education of American children in the early 1900s.
This is the first lesson from a 1901 printing. A story of Benjamin Franklin using private property to build something for the “common good” and his father teaching him a vital lesson:
Oh! To live in a world where every fourth-grader learns, "that almost all the public and private misery of mankind arises from a neglect of this great truth, — that evil can produce only evil, that good ends must be wrought out by good means."
Instead we find ourselves in a warped reality where every villainous idea or character from every book and movie—every example of bad—is being rewritten to be instead, simply “misunderstood.”
Even the most vile of characters (those who were meant to show that sometimes people knowingly and willfully choose to do evil) are being written in the hopes that we might “fall in love” with them.
In addition to teaching that there is, in fact, such a thing as right and wrong, these old children’s books taught us how to get along with others, how to see things from different perspectives, and how to weigh information and make sense of things when what we see and what others see are at odds.
I’d love to see one of those “on the street” interviews asking random adults to read aloud and then describe what is happening here:
I challenge you to find a fourth-grade reading assignment today and set it next to this. Or actually, don’t. Because it’s depressing.
Look, I'm not going to pretend the old days were better across the board. They weren't. But somewhere along the line we decided kids couldn't really handle much, and now we've got a generation that can't handle much. You’ll excuse me for noticing that those two things aren’t unrelated.
McGuffey gave a child a complex idea and trusted him to rise to it. That’s because for all of history up until just a few years ago, we knew that kids would rise to whatever you actually ask of them.
For some reason, we simply stopped asking for much.
When we first started writing Tuttle Twins books, we would get pushback from people who thought we were crazy for making books based on these complex ideas for grade-schoolers. They mocked us for thinking that a seven-year-old could understand things like coercion, inflation, sound economic policy, or natural law.
But we knew they were wrong, and millions of readers have proven it.
Our original storybooks all take a complex work by an expert in their field, and distill it just enough to make its principles accessible to young kids. The bonus is that we tell the stories in ways that kids actually love, so they’re encountering ideas that many adults haven’t ever been exposed to in a way that sticks because it’s fun.
John Taylor Gatto famously wrote about how the public education system was dumbing us down.
It’s impossible to look at how far we’ve come (and not in a good way) and conclude that he was anything but right.
But that doesn’t mean that we have to just give up.
Parents have more tools at their disposal than ever before to take the education of their children into their own hands, and we’ve spent the last decade making resources to help in this vital work.
It isn’t too late. But it is time to start.
— Connor
