This paper presents a historical study of three issues in education: (1) the teaching of morals; (2) teacher retraining; and (3) practices in language arts. It demonstrates that recent actions by the South Dakota legislature to ensure that children are given moral and character instruction are similar to efforts undertaken in the 1890s in North…

Outlines the most important 20th century developments in reading instruction for young children, analyzing why an approach was tried, and presenting results of these instructional efforts. It is concluded that the current perspective that seems to meet the needs of most children is that of emergent literacy. (SLD)