“THE FREEDMAN’S HOME
See this home! How neat, how warm,
how full of cheer it looks! It seems as
if the sun shone in there all the day long.
But it takes more that the light of the sun
to make a home bright all the time. Do
you know what it is? It is love.”

The work of Harriet Jacobs and the teachers of the Freedmen’s schools illustrate two aspects of teaching reading with adults during the 19th century. First, Jacob’s used what she called the “A,B, C” method, which others have referred to as the “alphabetic” method. Second, specially written Freedman’s readers oriented their lessons to the types of things that the authors thought would be of interest and relevance to former slaves, both children and adults, and they included illustrations with African-American children and adults in them. This is an early form of “functional context education” in teaching adults to read.

Cora Wilson Stewart (1875-1958)

A leading pioneer of adult literacy education, Cora Wilson Stewart, Superintendent of Instruction in Rowan County, Kentucky, noticed that many parents of the children in the public schools were illiterate. So she mobilized a group of teachers who volunteered to teach adults to read and write. The adults would be taught in the same schools as the children but at night, after the children went home. But because there were no street lights in the hills and hollows of the region, classes could only be held on moon lit nights, when adults could see their way to school. For this reason, the literacy program became known as the Moonlight Schools of Kentucky.

Stewart was devoted to the analytic (whole language) method of teaching reading. This is clearly indicated in the Soldier’s First Book which she published in 1917 for teaching soldiers to read during World War I. In the Instructions to Teachers at the front of the book, she states, “The reading lessons in this book are to be taught by the word and sentence method combined. It is as easy to teach “I go” as it is to teach I “g” “o”---“go”. The first lesson should be learned at one recitation. After teaching the pupil the sentence, drill him on words by pointing out and having him point out each word as many times as it occurs in the lesson, and by other drills.”

Stewart produced an innovative method for teaching adults to write. She understood that for adults who had to make a mark in public events, such as voting, nothing was more important than learning how to write their names. So she introduced the practice of taking a soft sheet of ink blotting paper and carving the person’s name in it. Students then traced over the indented name until they could write it without any guide from the blotter paper. Later this approach to teaching writing would be called the “kinesthetic method.”

Stewart was the first to produce reading materials especially for adults learning to read. She prepared a special newspaper, the Rowan County Messenger, to keep new learners up to date with local and national events. She wrote three Country Readers with contents that were related directly to the lives of adults outside the classroom, such as on the farm, health, civic activities, parenting, and other topics, including spiritual development, a topic no longer addressed in most adult literacy programs in the United States. This use of functional context education helped adults learn to read “real life” materials and transfer their new learning to contexts outside the classroom.