After eight years, 70 dozen cookies, 50 loaves of sandwiches, miles of knitting, and endless cups of tea, I’ve had enough of Home and School Associations. When my daughter, Karen, started kindergarten in 1950, in Hamilton, Ont.’s east end, I could hardly wait to pay my 50 cents to join Canada’s least exclusive, most over-publicized organization. …[F]undraising becomes an end in itself. No one seems to care where, when or why the money will be spent. A film strip, projector, kindergarten equipment, scissors, sports gear, drapes for the teachers’ lounge. If these are necessary we should ask for city funds for them….[M]any teachers never attend — often with good reason. Many attend night school, others have outside demands. Teachers who do come, tend to congregate in a corner; few parents have nerve enough to storm the barricade. (Bell, 1959, p. 20)

In response to her letter, readers attacked Mrs. Bell on several issues. Some accused her of writing under a pseudonym to hide her identity. Others felt she had undermined the important role of the Home and School Association in supporting public education. One writer felt she simply lacked a spirit of cooperation (1959, pp. 30–31). But a Mr. Thomas Ireland countered that the Home and School Association should not sweep Mrs. Bell’s concerns aside, and that indeed, “Home and School” structures should be more formal, purposeful, and exclusive, with two tiers of members, and thus become a more “streamlined, more effective organization conducive to recognition by all concerned” (December 1959, p. 31). In other words, Mr. Ireland seemed to be suggesting that if the literacy work done by the Home and School Association was less like women’s work, or more like government or business organizations, it would be accorded greater status. These exchanges suggest that the public literacy work carried out by mothers in the form of parental involvement in schools and public libraries was not always accorded the social status commensurate with the efforts and commitment invested in it.

In his 1955 best seller Why Johnny Can’t Read, Rudolph Flesch captured the anxiety among educators and psychologists surrounding the “reading culture crisis” and parents’ involvement in schools. He brought into the public sphere long-standing academic debates about how children should be taught to read, and advocated a more confrontational, rather than cooperative relationship between homes and schools. Flesch’s work, and other advice to mothers for teaching their children to read (or for why they should not teach their children to read), is considered in the next section.