How Lincoln Learned to Read

An author named Daniel Wolff has written a rather interesting book entitled How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations that Made Them. The author describes the early lives of 12 notable Americans in order to give us 12 'snapshots' of the history of American education. Mr. Wolff tells the story of each person's formative years, not only his classroom education, but also experiences at home and elsewhere that shaped each child's future life and vocation. Many of our most famous Americans received little or no formal education. Lincoln, for example, learned to read at home from his mother. Benjamin Franklin completed only two years of formal schooling and half of an apprenticeship, but became one of the first to achieve the American dream.

This book begins with Benjamin Franklin and ends with Elvis Presley. In between, Wolff includes Abigail Adams, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford, Helen Keller, and John F. Kennedy. These stories make clear that public school education as we know it is a recent invention. School attendance became compulsory in most states only in the 20th century, and as late as the 1920s, only a third of teenagers attended any high school.

This book shows how John Dewey's socialist vision for public schools split up the family. Father went off to his job, mother stayed home and did the chores, the kids walked down the hill and spent their day in school. The chief responsibility for raising children now fell, to a large extent, on the public school.

The author takes a typically liberal attitude toward private schooling. However, the book has enough valuable information to interest readers of any political view. This book by Daniel Wolff is entitled How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations that Made Them.

Audio version of this commentary.