‘History Debunked examines the classic Janet and John reading series, originally published in 1949. The discussion focuses on a 1960s library display at the Black Country Living Museum, where these books have been updated with contemporary warnings about their content and portrayal of society.’
Summary
The speaker discusses the Janet and John reading books, first published in Britain in 1949 and familiar to many early babyboomers. He remembers them as attractive, colourful and more engaging than earlier reading schemes, though he concedes that their repetitive prose had little literary merit.
He then turns to a reconstructed 1960s library at the Black Country Living Museum, where a copy apparently carries a warning that it may contain “negative depictions of people or cultures and outdated views.” After searching several books, he says he can find little objectionable material apart from the extraordinary freedom given to the two young children: they play near deep water, climb on a railway bridge and wander around an airfield without adult supervision.
He dismisses this as the likely reason for the warning and advances a more political explanation. He suggests that the real objection is that the books portray an entirely white society and a conventional married, heterosexual nuclear family. He concludes that the warning reflects contemporary preoccupation with racial and sexual inclusion and demonstrates the absurdity of modern cultural sensitivities.
Assessment
Regarding Simon Webb’s video, Janet and John Get a Trigger Warning, it struck me that he was barking up the wrong tree. The British Janet and John reading series was first published by James Nisbet & Co. in 1949–50, when Britain’s population was overwhelmingly white. It is therefore unsurprising that the books were not ethnically diverse – if that is the point Webb is making. If his argument is that it is illogical to impose the demography of present-day Britain upon a depiction of family life in the 1940s and 1950s, then he has my sympathy. My objection to the series, however, is based on pedagogy rather than diversity.
For me, the two halves of this article belong together. Simon Webb concentrates upon the cultural representation found in the Janet and John books. My concern is with the method of reading instruction they embodied and the effect it may have had upon the generation taught through them.
This is not an abstract issue. I have met baby boomers who remain frightened and ashamed by their inability to read fluently. I do not regard them as unintelligent or inadequate. I regard them as people who may have been failed by the system through which they were taught. Their difficulties should not automatically be treated as defects within themselves. In some cases, they are victims of an educational method that did not give them the tools they needed.
Overall judgement
So, Simon Webb’s commentary overlooks the most serious criticism of the Janet and John books: the series embodied the ‘look-and-say method’: children were encouraged to recognise whole words through repetition, pictures and context, rather than being taught systematically how written letters and letter-groups represent spoken sounds.
The method was later blamed for leaving a substantial number of children unable to decode unfamiliar words. Although phonics eventually became the official foundation of early reading instruction, substantial numbers of children in both Britain and the United States have continued to experience difficulty in learning to read. That is a much larger and more complicated subject. Teaching methods matter, but so does the unusual difficulty of written English, whose spelling reflects several historical layers and contains many irregular relationships between letters and sounds.
The continuing problem of literacy therefore deserves serious educational and linguistic examination. It has far more to do with the way reading is taught, the complexity of English spelling and differences in children’s opportunities and needs than with the racial composition or family arrangements depicted in an old reading book. The speaker turns instead towards a culture-war explanation and misses the stronger criticism that could legitimately be made of the series.
Coda
The ‘look-and-say method’ had been developed and widely adopted in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. It was embodied in reading schemes such as Dick and Jane, first published in 1930, and Alice and Jerry, which also appeared during the 1930s. The original Janet and John books, published in Britain from 1949, were adapted from the American Alice and Jerry series and introduced a comparable approach into British primary schools.
The first major popular attack on look-and-say came remarkably early. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It. He argued that the method required children to memorise words as visual shapes and left them unable to work out unfamiliar words for themselves. His book became a bestseller and helped to begin what became known as the “reading wars”.
‘Look-and-say’ put the cart before the horse. It treated fluent word recognition as though it could be acquired before children had mastered the elements from which words are constructed. Yet conscious, structured practice normally precedes automatic performance. A learner does not know how to drive before learning how to control the car, nor pick up a violin for the first time and play the solo part in a symphony. In every such case, skilled execution develops through practice in the component skills.
Reading is less visibly mechanical, and that made the error harder to detect. Fluent readers recognise many words instantly, but this automatic recognition is generally the result of having learned how letters and letter-groups correspond to sounds. Look-and-say mistook the end-product of skilled reading for the means by which that skill should be taught.
Fluent readers do eventually perceive familiar words largely as wholes. They can often recognise words even when the internal letters have been transposed, especially when the first and last letters remain in place and the surrounding context is clear. Letter order still contributes to accurate and effortless reading, however. A text written consistently in this way may remain intelligible while becoming psychologically irritating, because it forces the reader to attend consciously to processes that normally operate automatically.
Flesch’s criticism attracted considerable public attention, but educational practice changed much less than he had hoped. More than a quarter of a century later, in 1981, he returned to the subject in Why Johnny Still Can’t Read. His title reflected his frustration that look-and-say and related whole-word methods remained influential despite the arguments made in his earlier book.
A more scholarly examination had appeared in 1967, when the American psychologist Jeanne Chall published Learning to Read: The Great Debate. After reviewing the available research, Chall concluded that beginners generally benefited from explicit teaching of the alphabetic code and phonics. This was particularly important for children who did not arrive at school with strong language and literacy support. She did not propose that children should remain indefinitely with mechanical phonics exercises. Decoding was the initial means of giving them independent access to books and allowing them to read unfamiliar words without relying on pictures, context or adult assistance.
It would nevertheless be misleading to suggest that Flesch’s criticism led quickly to the imposition of phonics in Britain. The change was much slower and less direct. Look-and-say declined, but it was followed by whole-language, mixed-method and later “balanced literacy” approaches. These continued to encourage children to use pictures, context and sentence meaning alongside incomplete knowledge of letter–sound relationships.
In England, the decisive governmental turning point regarding the teaching of reading came with the Rose Review of 2006. It recommended that high-quality, systematic phonics should be taught explicitly and should provide the principal means by which beginners learned to recognise and decode written words. The government subsequently gave systematic synthetic phonics a central place in early reading instruction.
The policy was strengthened during the following years. Government support for systematic synthetic phonics expanded from 2011. The statutory Year 1 Phonics Screening Check was introduced in 2012. The national curriculum introduced in 2014 specified phonics as the primary means by which beginning readers should decode unfamiliar words.
The broad historical sequence is therefore clear. The whole-word method became influential in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Janet and John brought a version of it into post-war British classrooms from 1949. Rudolf Flesch launched the best-known popular attack in 1955 and renewed it in 1981 because the educational establishment had changed its practice far less than he believed necessary. Jeanne Chall provided a more substantial research-based critique in 1967. Phonics did not become the firmly prescribed foundation of early reading instruction in England until the Rose Review of 2006 and the policy changes that followed.
It would be excessive to claim that Janet and John prevented every child from learning to read. Many children did learn successfully from the books, sometimes because parents or teachers supplied phonics informally, and sometimes because they inferred the alphabetic principle for themselves. The serious criticism is that look-and-say made success unnecessarily dependent on memory, contextual guessing and outside help. It was particularly hazardous for children who could not discover the underlying sound system without being taught it directly.
The term dyslexia should not be used as a broad synonym for poor reading. Some children have a genuine and persistent difficulty with decoding and spelling, but others display similar symptoms because they have not received sufficiently systematic and effective instruction.
Diagnosis may bring academic advantages, including examination adjustments, specialist support and, in some circumstances, funded equipment. Access to these provisions may depend partly upon parental knowledge, persistence and the ability to pay for professional assessment.
During my time in independent schools, I saw detailed reports from educational psychologists recommending specific forms of support for particular pupils. The language was professional and the recommendations precise. My unease lay elsewhere. The psychologists were working conscientiously within the accepted assumptions and diagnostic parameters of their profession, but those parameters could themselves encourage a degree of certainty that the underlying knowledge might not justify.
This is not principally a criticism of individual practitioners. Decisions must be based upon the best knowledge available at the time. Psychologists can no more step outside the intellectual framework of their age than could the physicians who attended Henry VIII. The danger arises when provisional interpretations acquire the authority of settled fact. Good intentions, professional competence and institutional approval do not guarantee that the underlying assumptions are correct.
We are told that reading recruits identifiable networks within the brain, yet educational psychologists do not normally carry out any physiological examination. Dyslexia is diagnosed indirectly, through tests of reading, spelling, memory and phonological processing, together with an interpretation of the child’s educational history.
These measurements are real, but the conclusion drawn from them should not be automatic. It depends upon the tests selected, the thresholds applied and the assessor’s judgement about whether poor teaching, limited practice or some underlying difficulty provides the better explanation. Parental influence may also affect whether an assessment is obtained and how strongly a diagnosis is pursued.
The process is therefore open to inconsistency. It may be more disciplined than putting a finger in the air, but it is far removed from identifying a clearly demonstrated physiological defect.
