In “Cleopatra, A Life”, Little Brown, 2010, the author, Stacy Schiff, opens her intriguing biography of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs of Egypt by describing the education of the Queen of Egypt in the first century BC. Schiff portrays Cleopatra as a well-educated and brilliant young-woman and political strategist, who used her many skills and in particular her language skills—she spoke her native Greek, as well as Latin, Egyptian and several other local Egyptian dialects fluently—to advance herself and the fortunes of her nation. The author describes Cleopatra’s Hellenistic era education in Alexandria, Egypt and details how in early childhood she was taught to read. Based on well-documented reports and archeological evidences which were exceptionally well preserved in Egypt, Shiff recounts how Cleopatra’s tutors used what we would today call the “phonics” system to teach reading.
In her first lessons Cleopatra had to memorize and recite out-loud the alphabet..both forward and backward. She learn to recognize both capital letters and lowercase..as well as those written in cursive form. She was provided with a wax tablet and an ivory stylus to copy her letters…she was required to do this over and over again. Her tutors presented her with paired letters which she had to sound out sounds created by the pairings, then she was tasked with creating her own groups of letters to which she had to provide those sounds. She was encouraged to use any series of letters—even meaningless ones—had to be sounded out. The intention was that she would not be flummoxed by any combination of letters..however strange to her. Then came actual reading of texts of the well-known Greek myths, fables and Greek and of Macedonian history. Alexandria and its Hellenistic children were of a homogeneous clulture. The verbal sounds (words) of these Greek myths and history were well known to every Hellenistic child…they had mental imagery—of Alexander the Great—Zeus—or Athena—to be able to identify words if they could sound them out they could recognize what that written word meant.
(That does become a problem in more diverse populations)
When I was a youngster, early in the middle of the last (the 20th) century, I was taught to read in a very structured and organized way. Similar to Cleopatra’s regimen of 2,000 years earlier—by first memorizing the alphabet, reciting the letters out loud with the class, copying my letters (not with an ivory stylus, but with a steel nibbed pen which had to be dipped in an ink well) onto a sheet of lined paper over and over so I could recognize them as capitals and lower case and knew how to sound them out. Then, we were called on by our teacher to “sound out” two or more combined letters our teacher wrote on the chalk board. After that, we were introduced to simple books which had both pictures and words.
I recall one of these stories well..in which a child “Jack” took a trip to his grandfather’s farm. The structured and conservative system worked for me…I quickly identified with the character Jack who liked going to the farm and loved animals. I even knew many of the animals he encountered and quickly learned how to sound out a word and recognize what that word was referring to.
But by the latter part of that last century—- things changed greatly for my own children when they were tasked with learning to read. Perhaps it was that the phonics based system of the past was too structured and mechanistic for the “age of change for change’s sake” in the last part of the 20th century. A fresh and new approach to the teaching reading arrived in my children’s class rooms.
Gone were the elongate sheets with huge bold-painted capital letters of the alphabet stretched across the room above the teacher’s desk. In fact, the teacher’s desk was gone too. Now a reading specialist sat on a metal chair in the center of the room with about 15-20 small chairs surrounding her. His or her emphasis was not on learning to sound out short strings of letters but to appreciate books and try to read the legend below the pictures using visual “clues” from the words the student knew and the arrangement of the letters as well as the pictures. No more sounding out..this new approach was holistic and called the “whole language” approach.
This holistic approach to teaching reading became popular in the 1980-90s when many other progressive ideas were being touted as “scientific” and better than the old way. The 80s saw the rise of environmentalism, women’s rights, Anti-Apartheid movement against South Africa, AIDS response, Gay rights, Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. Many of these ideas proved useful and were improvements that served the nation well. But not all did. “Holistic” reading was a major failure.
I read recently (November 2025) of a Wisconsin school district which finally abandoned its long held “holistic” or “whole language” approach (in 2025) for reading. Although this approach ignored the mechanistic “phonics based” system that most children experienced of earlier times, for about the last decade it had fallen out of favor in tandem with the massive falling abilities of youngsters to read well.
Reading is a relatively difficult skill to learn. Statistics seem to prove this so. In a modern age when reading is essential for survival, on the global scale, about 14% of the world population over the age of fifteen years still can not read.
The USA is no paragon of ability in this skill set. The USA has a functional illiteracy rate of 21% overall, (that is: only 79% of our population can read). Furthermore, almost one-third of Americans are described as “having significant difficulty with simple everyday reading tasks” and more than half (54%) can not read above the 6th grade level. Our own nation, at 79% literate is well below the 86% global literate average. Some states in the US are significantly lower than the global average as well. California has a literacy rate of only about 77% is the lowest in the US, while New York has a rate of 78%, and Florida about 80%—all below the average.
Though speaking -or making sounds—is a natural process for humans, we can babble and blurb baby sounds from infancy—(or almost all of us can), but reading is not a “hard wired skill”. We must learn to read! Learning anything takes time, concerted effort, determination, mental focus as well as previous enriching experiences which provide mental support. Reading is more difficult for many children who come from impoverished backgrounds, and for non-native speakers. This, no doubt, partly explains the reason for California’s low literacy rate where many recent Hispanic immigrants reside.
To read, a young child’s brain is required to perform several tasks simultaneously. The child must see a letter of the alphabet and recognize it— and then, recall instantly the sound that that individual letter represents—seen perhaps by a child as a “squiggly” line.. Then, almost simultaneous recognize an adjoining letter and combine the two (or more) juxtaposed letters to formulate a new sound. To read a word the child brain must put these representative symbols of sounds together with others to form a single sound or series of sounds which form a “word”.
To understand what they have read, the word sounded out so laboriously, should represent a stored image, a concept or idea —that resides in the child’s mind. Here is the rub..for some children that stored image may not be there. Children who are not native English speakers, have had little exposure to books, or come from a different culture, economic level, or have had few enriching life experiences may not be able to relate a sounded English word to a meaningful mental image.
Learning to read is hard work.
The following are my own thoughts on the complex processes of the reading process. They are based on my personal experiences. I am sure there are some neuro/pschyo experts who would differ. This is simply how I see it.
Thus, (according to this author) in order to understand a word the child has “sounded” out, he or she must have a stored mental image of the concept, or “thing” that that “word” represents. For a beginning reader—with limited or few stored images-or perhaps no images at all— that student has no relatable mental imagery that he or she can pair with the word on the page. This results in faulty (or absent) comprehension of what the word means or what the writer was attempting to convey.
Great poets and prose writers make use the typed words on a page…they use them to “call up” those mentally stored images in the mind of the reader.. A great writer’s words on a page cause bright images to flash up in the mind of the reader. In a sentence or paragraph of an author, a whole panoply of related images form in the brain of the reader that can sometimes be more realistic and of greater intensity than actual reality.
Often the written words of a great writer tell a fascinating story (such as Clemens’ imagery-rich story of Huck Finn on the Mississippi) can not be surpassed even by modern film and photography, with dedicated professional actors and modern electronic effects and technology. The mental impact of Clemens’ words far outdistance the visual and aural effects—even on film shot right there on location. This is the effect of the wonderful world of books and of reading…calling up the stored mental images with an innocuous looking little series of black letters on a white sheet of paper which are formed into magical words.
So it seems to me…that what is needed in teaching reading is both the basics in phonics…as well as holistic whole language approaches…Phonics provides the means to sound out words so that they can be identified….Whole language approach may help to provide those mental images which are necessary for those children who do not have them —coming from a different culture, a challenging economic situation, or not having English as your native language.
So it seems to me..we need that old phonics system back! But we also need those mental images that typed words call up in our minds. Perhaps a bit of both systems may function to solve our present situation of falling reading skills…where new readers come from diverse backgrounds and cultures and not all have English as their native tongue.
