The three Rs

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The three Rs[1] are three basic skills taught in schools: reading, writing and arithmetic", Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic[2] or Reckoning. The phrase appears to have been coined at the beginning of the 19th century.

Origin and meaning

The skills themselves are alluded to in St. Augustine's Confessions: Template:Langx 'learning to read, and write, and do arithmetic'.[3]

The phrase is sometimes attributed to a speech given by Sir William Curtis circa 1807: this is disputed.[4][5][6] An extended modern version of the three Rs consists of the "functional skills of literacy, numeracy and ICT".[7]

The educationalist Louis P. Bénézet preferred "to read", "to reason", "to recite", adding, "by reciting I did not mean giving back, verbatim, the words of the teacher or of the textbook. I meant speaking the English language."[8]

See also

Notes

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  1. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  2. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  3. ↑ Confessions 13:1:20 Loeb Classical Library, p. 37
  4. ↑ Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, 2008, s.v. 'R' I:3
  5. ↑ Christine Ammer, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, 2nd edition, 2013, s.v., p. 457, excerpted in The Free Dictionary
  6. ↑ John Limbird, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, 124 (January 22, 1823), p. 75
  7. ↑ Functional Skills
  8. ↑ L. P. Benezet, "The Teaching of Arithmetic I, II, III: The Story of an Experiment," Journal of the National Education Association, Volume 24(8): 241-244 (November 1935)

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