In late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literacy advice, domestic
literacy as an everyday practice associated with morality and character building
became linked with, and almost indistinguishable from, advice for promoting
reading as a pedagogic task linked to supporting the work of schools. Prominent
psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall and Edmund Huey complained about the physically
and intellectually harmful methods used to teach children to read in the school.
Their perspectives later found support in the historical scholarship of Graff
(1979) and Vincent (2000), who argued that schools sought to render reading
and writing difficult and unfamiliar, so the institution could gain the credibility
and status among parents that was required to justify removing children from
their domestic economies. Rather than learning literacy through living, children
would learn literacy to live (Vincent, 2000, p. 23–26) and parents’
roles were ideally to support, but not to supplant, that project. Mothers’
responsibilities shifted to the ambiguous ones of providing a home context that
facilitated children’s learning in school, rather than, in the image of
the “cottage mother and father,”
teaching their children the literacies
of their material survival and cultural continuity.
Psychology put its stamp on the discursive construction of the normal
family and its links to children’s reading abilities. G. Stanley
Hall was widely touted as the “father of educational psychology”
and the leader of the Child Study movement that involved middle-class mothers
in documenting the developmental progress of their own children (Dehli, 1994;
Hulbert, 2003). He dedicated considerable attention in his research and advice
writing to the reading practices of children, particularly of adolescents:
Of course the pupils must write, and write well, just as they must read, and read much; that English suffers from insisting upon this double long circuit too early and cultivates it to excess, devitalizes school language and makes it a little unreal, like other affectations of adult ways. (Hall, 1904, p. 21)