40 (Footnote) Since I am a nurse, and not a teacher, the language expert who gave me the books also gave mean extensive briefing -- a course that took an entire day -- on how to use the books to teach the alien. He said the reason he chose these particular books was because the original 1836 version of these books were used for three- quarters of a century to teach about four-fifths of all American schoolchildren how to read. No other books ever had so much influence over American children for so long. McGuffey's educational course begins in "The Primer" by presenting the letters of the alphabet to be memorized, in sequence. Children were then taught, step by step, to use the building blocks of the language to form and pronounce words, using the phonics method
