Abstract
In the summer, 1989 the writer had the first chance to touch the copies of the McGuffey's Eclectic Readers in the Special Collections of Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio. William Holmes McGuffey, author of the Readers, was president of the University (1839-43) and pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in the town.The first editions of the Readers 1-VI were issued through 1836-57 in Cincinnati, Ohio and after that they were revised and spread mainly in Middie America over two generations. The total of the copies amounted to 122, 000, 000. The popularity was due to McGuffey's first intention of teaching young learners moral values in the Bible as much as literary stories.The writer's question is why McGuffey's Primer and Readers were little known in early Meiji period, though they were said to have made the American mind. It was partly because Fukuzawa Yukichi, whose school was very influencial, took Wilson's Primer and Readers and other readers home with him from America, but not McGuffey's ones, and also partly because he regarded Reading as a means of understanding other English books such as science and history, not as for knowing moral background of European civilization.
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