J. Duncan Spaeth (1868-1954)

During World War I, John Duncan Spaeth, a native of Philadelphia with a Ph. D. in early Anglo-Saxon literature from the University of Leipzig,, took time away from his position as Professor of English at Princeton University and worked as Educational Director of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) at Camp Wheeler, Georgia and Camp Jackson, South Carolina. Because large numbers of men being called for military service were illiterate, or of very limited literacy, schooling in reading and writing became a necessary element of military training.

In 1918, the Southwestern Department of the National War Work Department of the Y.M.C.A. in Atlanta, Georgia published the "Camp Reader for American Soldiers," written by Spaeth. In this book Spaeth acknowledged the help of Cora Wilson Stewart. But in a revised edition published in 1919 there was no recognition of Stewart’s influence. In fact, Spaeth rejected the analytic method of teaching reading that Stewart favored and instead became the first person to prepare an extensive theoretical introduction to the synthetic (phonics emphasis) method of reading teaching written especially for teachers of adults.

Though he eschewed the analytic method of teaching reading favored by Stewart, Spaeth used the same functional context education approach in the Camp Reader for American Soldiers as used by Stewart in the Country Life Readers and the Soldier’s First Book that she had prepared for teaching soldiers to read in World War I. Spaeth’s Camp Reader for American Soldiers was illustrated with pictures of Army situations and it included much of the vocabulary and concepts used in training in soldiering that the Army expected new recruits to learn, and it provided spiritual and morale building readings as well.

Frank C. Laubach (1884-1970)

According to the New York Times of June 12, 1970, in 1911, the year Cora Wilson Stewart started the Moonlight Schools, Frank C. Laubach received a master’s degree in sociology from Columbia. In 1913, the year that the "each one teach one" slogan was invented for use in Kentucky, Laubach received his doctorate in sociology. In 1914 he was ordained a Congregationist minister and a year later, in 1915, he and his wife left for the Philippines to work as missionaries.

A chronology from the Laubach Literacy library in Syracuse, New York reports that in 1930, "While working as a missionary among the Maranao people of the Philippines, Frank C. Laubach developed a simple method to teach them to learn to read and write in their own language. He also discovered the potential of volunteer tutors, as newly-literate Maranaos offered to teach illiterate family and friends. This one-to-one instructional approach became known as "Each One Teach One." A review of books by Laubach (1947,1960) revealed no citation of the earlier origins of the "each one teach one" slogan in the work of Cora Wilson Stewart. For now, it appears that this slogan that has played a major role in advancing the policy and practice of using volunteers in adult literacy programs may have had two separate birthplaces, first in the hills and hollows of Kentucky, and some fifteen years later in the dense jungles of Mindanao Island in the Philippines.

Like Spaeth, Laubach (1947, 1960) followed the synthetic or alphabetic code method in teaching reading as a second signaling system for listening to speech. In teaching decoding, one of his major innovations for teaching adults was to use picture mnemonics to teach the sight-sound correspondences, such as using a picture of a snake curved to look like an “s” to teach the sound that goes with the graphic letter “s”.

In 1955, Laubach started Laubach Literacy in the United States and through this organization thousands of volunteers were taught to teach reading the “Each One Teach One” way. In materials called the Laubach Way to Reading for new readers there were four structured workbooks that presented letter-sound correspondences. Following tightly scripted tutoring manuals and graded readers using word lists that Laubach assembled, adults were taught decoding and then introduced to reading texts of increasing difficulty.