ABSTRACT
THE THREE R’S OF “READIN’,’RITIN’, and ’Rithmetic” were late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century creations, geared to the needs of a developing industrial society. Reading was the functional reading of sales slips and bills of lading, combined with the inspirational stories of Horatio Alger and the moral aphorisms of McGuffey. Writing was literally penmanship, with the Palmer method introducing a ledger-oriented style in the first grade. Such cursive training had to begin early, for by the fifth grade half of those who had entered as first graders had left. Arithmetic, not mathematics, was essentially column addition and subtraction, with algorithmic multiplication and division coming in the later elementary years. Again, the emphasis was on store clerk functionalism, keeping the sales slips and ledgers accurate and neat. Problem solving was introduced as early as the second grade, but it was heavily, if not exclusively, associated with buying in an urban store.
