1630’s-The first formal schools appear in the 1630’s. However conditions were very different than schoolrooms now. For one thing, most “teachers’ moonlighted as grave diggers, choir directors, or personal assistants. This may be because in these days teachers were paid in cows, pigs, apples, or firewood.

1647-The “Deluder Satan Act” required that every Massachusetts town of at least 50 households hire a teacher of reading and writing. Towns with a hundred or more households had to operate a grammar school as well. If they town didn’t obey the law, they were fined 5 pounds (about $25.oo today).

1690-The New England Primer was published and became a popular beginner’s textbook. It taught spelling, religion, and the alphabet. Despite being only 3 by 4 inches and 90 pages in length, it stayed in use for 100 years!

1700’s- Schools are still not prevalent, so many parents taught their child to read at home using a hornbook. A hornbook was a wooden board with a handle, a lesson sheet of the ABC’s in small and capital letters, and a series of syllables. These lessons were attached to the board and protected by a thin layer of cow’s horn, hence the name. Wealthy families had fancy hornbooks with jewels, leather, and ivory pointers, but most hornbooks were plain with a string around the handle to be worn around the neck.

During this time, early primers and readers were also being created. Interestingly, most of these books used pictures of animals reading and writing to enforce to children how simple it was to become literate. It may seem far-fetched, but apparently watching Spot the dog learn syllables worked because….

1750’s-Literacy rates were the highest in the New England, about 75% for males and 65% for females. The literacy rates in the Middle and Southern colonies however, were lower.

1789-The first novel The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown is published.

1789-1800-350 novels are published.

1800’s-The Library of Congress was established in Washington D.C., to the tune of a $50,000 appropriation. The money was used to purchase approximately 900 books, which arrived from London in eleven trunks.

1829-Louis Braille creates the first Braille book.

1900’s- Literacy grows rapidly during the 19th century. New printing technology meant that newspapers, magazines and books were widely available for the first time in history. At the same time, millions of children were learning to read via the McGuffey Reader, classic textbooks published throughout the 1800’s.

1981-Scholastic Book Fairs begin in California, soon spreading nation-wide.

1983-Ronald Reagan unveiled a national program called the Adult Illiteracy Initiative, aimed at wiping out illiteracy among 23 million adult Americans.

1985-The U.S. Department of Education finds that the single most significant factor influencing a child’s early educational success is an introduction to books and being read to prior to beginning school.

1991-National Literacy Act is established by George Bush to help 30 million adults over the age of sixteen become literate. The Act increased federal funding for literacy initiatives.

1996-Oprah’s Book Club is created.

2003-According to the National Assessment of adult literacy, an estimated 30 million people fall into the Below Basic skill level, including 7 million who are non-literate in English. This means that these individuals are unable to accomplish basic daily tasks such as reading to their children, understanding dosage instructions for medicine, or adding numbers on a bank slip.

2008-Sabi games ships a drawing game that uses Living Ink – technology unique to Sabi’s drawing games – to tell the computer what the child has drawn. The drawing game – ItzaBitza – gets children WANTING to read in order to know what to draw next.

2009-The National Endowment for the Arts found that the percentage of adults reading some kind of literary work was just over half, with the highest rise being in the 18-24 age range.

Information Taken From:

http://www.ednews.org/articles/332/1/An-Interview-with-Alan-Boyko-About-the-Scholastic-Book-Fair-Education-and-Learning/Page1.html

http://www.filedbyblog.com/?tag=a-new-chapter-in-american-literacy

http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/19thcentury1800.htm