Reading in the Twentieth Century

This is an account of reading instruction in the twentieth century. It will end, as do most essays written in the final year of any century, with predictions about the future. My hope is to provide an account of the past and present of reading instruction that will render predictions about the future transparent. Thus I begin with a tour of the historical pathways that have led us, at century’s end, to the rocky and highly contested terrain we currently occupy in reading pedagogy. After unfolding my version of a map of that terrain, I will speculate about pedagogical journeys that lie ahead of us in a new century and a new millennium.