Excerpt from How to Teach Reading, and What to Read in School

Pronounced with it as a syllable, e.g., 6, was played by the child, who said dé, it could, as a reward, bite an apple, see a picture, smell a flower, etc. In his school-bakery, sweet cakes, and even bread, were baked in the form of letters, and the most doltish child soon learned to call 'for a large gingerbread 20 instead of the small 2, and usually graduated from an alphabet diet of four weeks as an accomplished a-é-c There were alphabet blocks, alphabet songs, dolls, pictures, rhymes, games, etc. By some of the philanthropinists, boys were taught w by twisting their bodies into something like its shape, and crying woe they personated f by dressing in helmet, big neck tie, and stilts; or s, by putting on an artificial hump and big belly, etc. Pestalozzi taught his classes to spell long lists of words by heart before they saw the letters and then, showing the letters, had them combined in every way, somewhat after the fashion of the house that Jack built while some of his followers degenerated to exercises in pronouncing senseless combinations of forty or fifty letters each. A leading, though by no means the only, motive of these and many other methods which might be cited, was to reduce the function of the letter name, or defer it to a later stage in learning to read. Although the letter-name was once defended, because mechanical, the pedagogic rage against its chief use in spelling has run very high in Germany. Kehr1 says it has caused children ages of misery. Heinicke says it required thousands of superfluous associations, and that no child ever did really learn to read by.

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