Frustration with the books used in public schools to teach children how to read is nothing new. An article in The New Yorker recounts how an attack on primers in the 1955 best-seller Why Johnny Can't Read ultimately led to publication of The Cat in the Hat and other classics by Dr. Seuss. Not only were primers "horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers," charged Rudolf Flesch, the author of the 1955 attack, they were based on a flawed pedagogy: the idea that children learn words by memorizing them rather than sounding them out. After reading Flesch's book, an editor at Houghton Mifflin contacted Dr. Seuss and challenged him to write a story using only words that first-graders could recognize or sound out. The result was The Cat in the Hat, which eventually sold over 7.2 million copies and transformed the nature of children's books because it stood for the idea that reading ought to be taught by phonics, and language skills ought to be taught using illustrated storybooks rather than primers. "Cat People: What Dr. Seuss really taught us," by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2002
