History of Reading News. Vol.XXV No.2 (2002:Spring)

Editors’ Note: Anna Jászö Adamik has published the second edition of her history of Hungarian literacy instruction, A magyar olvasástanítás története (Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2001). The following passages are excerpted from her eight-page synopsis in English that ends the book.

“In the medieval schools, as in the rest of Europe, Latin was the language which was taught…The first literary works in Latin were produced very early in the 11th century, earlier than the Polish or Czech ones…The first decision to teach reading in the mother tongue was made by the council led by Cardinal Miklós Oláh in 1560. The first reader known to us appeared in 1553 in Kolozsvár (Cluj) in Transsylvania using the alphabetic method…In this early period, writing was not taught at all, or it was taught later after pupils had acquired reading skills…[T]he aim of teaching was to prepare people to read the Bible, therefore, the texts in the readers had a religious character.

“At the beginning of the 1770s, influential reforms were initiated in the Hapsburg Empire to which Hungary belonged…It was the Silesian Ignaz Felbiger’s Methodenbuch which had a great influence on the methodology of the teaching of reading. He taught reading and writing simultaneously [and] demanded that the sounds of the letters be pronounced and not the names…

“During the century of the Enlightenment, the content of reading material changed. Several texts about the environment, the government, the geographical and political structure of the country, that is to say texts with a utilitarian character, appeared. However, they did not lose their religious and moral character…

“From the beginning of the 19th century, the German, Austrian and Swiss education systems had a strong influence all over Europe. The phonic method developed by the German Stephani at the beginning of the 19th century, and the simultaneous teaching of reading and writing, emphasized by the German Graser, at the same time, conformed closely to the traditions of our education system and the character of the Hungarian spelling system and language structure. On the other hand, the Gedike-Jacotot trend, that is, the word method, in German, the ‘Normalwörter Methode’ had some impact, but not the absolute one that occurred in the USA later. The trend developed by Hungarian educators during the 1850s and the 1860s was a combined method and has had many names…More recently it has been called the phonic-analytic-synthetic method (PAS)…

“[In the 1880s and 1890s] [t]he utilitarian and moral stories inherited from the century of the Enlightenment were replaced by animal fables, Hungarian folk tales, verses of popular poetry, and stories from the flourishing field of children’s literature….At the end of the 19th century, a very Hungarian reading method was founded. This was known as ‘phonomimics’ or ‘fonomimika’ in Hungarian…The essential feature of this method is to make the learning of sounds easier by means of signs made by the hands…[in order] to facilitate blending…

“As is well known, 1948-1949 is a turning point in Hungarian history, as this was when the communist era started. At that time, church schools were nationalized and the school system was rigidly centralised. Phonomimics were forbidden because they were considered to be a ‘tool of bourgeois methodology’. From 1950, however, a new variation of the PAS method was used, and only one type of ABC book and reader was allowed…Centralised decisions put our reading instruction back about 60 years, but, on the whole, the educators of the period did not do any severe damage. It was not the method itself, but rather the readers who suffered. Texts were filled with political slogans, with biographies of communist leaders and communist and Soviet holidays…

“The Ministry of Education introduced a system of alternative programmes after 1978…These programmes caused problems in reading instruction because they did not use the PAS method, and introduced some aspects of American reading instruction, wrenching them from their original context. Since 1989, in the new democratic era…eight new reading programs have appeared whose common characteristic has been to restore the PAS method…”

On history: “We can always learn from the successes and failures of the past. History is a treasure of accumulated experience…At this point, I would like to emphasize the importance of qualitative, philological research methods against the autocracy of quantitative methods.”