THE SCIENCE OF READING

From its inception, the science of reading has been intertwined with American anxieties about culture.

The science of reading, writes history professor Johns, began in the latter decades of the 19th century, as the proliferation of print in American life gave rise to worries that it would overwhelm a vulnerable public. The nascent field of experimental psychology studied the process of reading, developing two instruments that would be improved upon and used for decades to come: the tachistoscope, which measured how well subjects recognized words; and the eye-movement camera, which recorded the behavior of subjects’ eyes as they read passages of text. The author’s account ranges back and forth, tracing his topic’s implication in eugenics, adaptation to improvements in World War II aircraft cockpit design, adoption by industry to improve the efficiency of the workforce, and incorporation into modern machine-reading technology. It’s a mammoth subject, and Johns takes some detours to explore, for instance, mid-20th-century librarianship’s adoption of the tools of science to expand its mission. In a later chapter on “the reading wars,” the author delves into Rudolf Flesch’s highly influential 1955 jeremiad, Why Johnny Can’t Read, but those who have familiarity with the push-pull between whole-language and phonics-based teaching will have seen the planting of those seeds in the dismayed discovery that the early-20th-century turn toward science-based instruction in silent reading revealed a population of students with dyslexia. Johns’ argument that this “Manichean dualism” has fed today’s popular suspicion of scientific expertise is dismally convincing. The commercialization of the science of reading is also a constant, seen in the line of products leading from the Ophthalm-O-Graph through the Talking Typewriter, the Dynabook, and Hooked on Phonics, as well as such contemporary products as Feng-GUI and Microsoft’s MCR. Illustrations include laboratory photographs of subjects at formidable-looking testing apparatus and equally daunting diagrams that attest to researchers’ efforts.  

A leggy, fascinating survey of a discipline that is often taken for granted.