João de Deus, the poet whose primer taught Portugal to read

In early March 1895, trains full of students pulled into Lisbon. The Coimbra students got off at the Rossio station, and more came from Porto, Santarém, Braga, Lamego and Portalegre, carrying the banners of their schools. On 8 March, the sixty-fifth birthday of the poet João de Deus, they joined the Lisbon students and marched to his house.2 sources2 sources

The weather was stormy. The poet watched the procession from his window, and the illustrated Lisbon magazine O Occidente reported that he was moved to tears. The next day was fine, so the students marched again, and the student bands of Coimbra and Porto played in front of his house.1 source1 source

That evening the students held a gala at the Teatro de D. Maria II, with King Carlos and his ministers in the audience. When João de Deus came into his box the cheering went on for more than ten minutes. As he left, students spread their academic capes on the street for him to walk on. Then they unhitched the horses from his carriage and pulled him home themselves with a long rope.1 source1 source

On the birthday itself King Carlos went to the poet's house in person to give him the grand cross of the Order of Santiago, and waived the fees that came with it. The Royal Academy of Sciences and the Instituto de Coimbra made him a member, and some town councils named streets after him. O Occidente called him one of Portugal's greatest benefactors, for his method of teaching reading: a small primer called the Cartilha Maternal.1 source1 source

In 1878 the census found that 79.4 per cent of people in mainland Portugal could neither read nor write. The share fell slowly: 76 per cent of over-sevens in 1890, 74.1 per cent in 1900 and 69.7 per cent in 1911. By 1900 more than 80 per cent of people in England, France and Belgium could read; Portugal only passed 50 per cent around 1950.3 sources3 sources

Schools were few. In 1843 Portugal had 3.2 schools for every 10,000 people, and 7.8 by 1884. Even in the 1910s many were a single room for all four classes, or a flat adapted for the purpose. Children worked in the fields and came to school only now and then, and many teachers were curates or sacristans who did little more than teach the catechism.3 sources3 sources

Families got by without reading. When they needed a lease drawn up or a letter written, they used a public letter-writer or a relative who had learned. Reading a little did not get a poor boy a better job, and emigrating to Brazil was a surer way out of poverty than school.1 source1 source

The way reading was taught made it harder. Children named each letter, then the syllable, then joined syllables into words, and some primers were nothing but lists of syllables to memorise. In 1850 the poet António Feliciano de Castilho published a quicker method using games and rhymes, but it still split words into pieces.1 source1 source

João de Deus de Nogueira Ramos was born on 8 March 1830 in São Bartolomeu de Messines, a village in the municipality of Silves, in the Algarve. He studied law at the University of Coimbra from 1850 to 1859.1 source1 source

His obituary in O Occidente said the degree never interested him much. He wrote his first verses by the willows of the Mondego, took ten years to graduate and stayed on in Coimbra until 1862, when he moved to Beja. There he edited the newspaper O Bejense until 1864, then went home to Silves to work as a lawyer and journalist.2 sources2 sources

In 1868 he was elected to parliament for Silves and moved to Lisbon; his obituary in O Occidente gives the year as 1869. He refused to join a party, rarely went to the chamber and did not stand again. O Occidente wrote that to make a living he composed rhyming quatrains to go with sweets, at 2,000 réis for every 25.3 sources3 sources

He cared little about publishing. Friends copied down the verses he recited and sent them to newspapers, and in 1868 one of them, José António Garcia Blanco, published a collection in Lisbon, Flores do Campo (Field Flowers). Ramo de Flores (A Bunch of Flowers) followed in Porto in 1869, and Folhas Soltas in 1876. In 1896 the president of the Chamber of Deputies said that many of the poems would never have been printed without his friends.4 sources4 sources

Lines like these, short and plain, made him the most popular poet in the country. When he died, the president of the chamber said that in the opinion of many he was the greatest Portuguese poet since Luís de Camões, the sixteenth-century author of the national epic.1 source1 source

The method began as private lessons: friends often asked João de Deus to teach their children or protégés to read. The earliest trace is a set of handwritten tables from the summer of 1874, made for teaching a girl called Carolina, whose father, Celestino de Sousa, signed the note on them. In two-syllable words the letters of the second syllable were dotted with white, so that the reader could see where one syllable ended without the word being cut in two.1 source1 source

A village teacher turned the idea into a course. José Cândido Augusto de Madureira, the parish priest (abade) of Arcozelo, in Vila Nova de Gaia just south of Porto, ran the elementary school there. On 17 February 1876 he opened the first school taught by the method, helped by the poet's brother, Father António do Espírito Santo Ramos, who apparently painted large wall charts with the syllables in black and orange.2 sources2 sources

Printing was harder. The book had to be printed in one ink, and the Porto printer António José da Silva Teixeira did not have enough large type. The answer was to set the syllables alternately in plain black type and in type scored with fine horizontal lines, which looks grey. Letters from June 1876 record the printer's objection that mixing ordinary and striped type went against the rules of his trade.2 sources2 sources

Finding a publisher was no easier. In a note written while the book was at the press, João de Deus said that in Lisbon he could not get it published even for nothing, though he had offered it to a well-known publisher who was himself a poet and prose writer.1 source1 source

The title page is dated 1876 and gives Porto as the place of printing. The historian Justino Magalhães counts two editions that year, the first called simply Arte de Leitura (Art of Reading). Another historian, Isolina Pereira, suggests the book may in fact have come off the press in 1877.3 sources3 sources

The first lesson taught the five vowels. The next began with v, a sound a child can hold as long as it likes, and used real words straight away: vá, vai, vi, via, viu, vivia (go, goes, I saw, he was seeing, he saw, he lived). There were no pictures, because João de Deus wanted verbs, and a verb cannot be drawn. Before capital letters appeared the book used 718 common words.2 sources2 sources

The teacher's notes were blunt. “Read them, and never spell,” he told teachers. Asking a child to believe that the letters cê, agá and á added up to the word chá “may be teaching to read, but it is at the same time dulling the mind. A thousand times better illiterate than an idiot.”1 source1 source

The method had critics, who argued over the sounds of the letters and the place of spelling. A decree of 20 April 1878 ordered a test comparing classes taught by his method and by the old one, but it never took place. Magalhães sees the resistance as mostly about tradition and about competing publishers. João de Deus registered the striped syllables as a trademark and initialled the copies to stop pirate editions. The book went through eight editions before 1900 and twenty more in the twentieth century.1 source1 source

In 1882 Casimiro Freire, a republican industrialist and a friend of the poet, founded the Associação de Escolas Móveis pelo Método João de Deus, the Association of Mobile Schools. It sent teachers qualified in the method to any town or parish that asked, as far as its funds allowed, where they taught children and adults of both sexes.2 sources2 sources

The missions usually went where there was no public school. A teacher could enrol up to 60 pupils in several classes; the evening classes were meant for adults but also took working children. A mission was meant to last three or four months and ended with an examination held in public before the local authorities.1 source1 source

The state took notice. In 1888 Augusto Ribeiro, a deputy for the Azores, proposed a law declaring the Cartilha Maternal the national reading method and creating a post of commissioner-general for it, held for life by its author with a pension of 900,000 réis a year. It passed unanimously, and a decree of 2 August 1888 created the post, which let him contract with town councils to train their teachers.2 sources2 sources

It did not last. The post was abolished in 1892 for lack of money, and in 1895, the year of the student homage, the education directorate withdrew the method from the schools. When a law of 1905 imposed a single set of school textbooks, the beginners' reading book was the one exception: teachers could pick any approved primer, and many picked his.2 sources2 sources

João de Deus had a heart condition and knew he was dying. He died in Lisbon on Saturday 11 January 1896. The city was celebrating news from Mozambique, where Mouzinho de Albuquerque had just taken the African ruler Gungunhana prisoner, and the week after the funeral it welcomed the victorious soldiers home.4 sources4 sources

Two days later, in the Chamber of Deputies, the prime minister, Ernesto Hintze Ribeiro, laid a bill before the house: the Treasury would pay for the funeral, and his widow, Guilhermina Bataglia Ramos, and their four children would receive a tax-free pension of 1,000,000 réis a year. “He died poor!” Hintze Ribeiro told the house, adding that the king had been the first to ask the government to help the family. The deputies approved the bill by acclamation and closed the sitting at 3.35 in the afternoon.1 source1 source

His body lay in the Estrela basilica, guarded day and night by students in turns. It was the students who first asked the government to bury him in the Jerónimos monastery, near the remains of Camões and the historian Alexandre Herculano. Wreaths piled up around the coffin, many with no name on them. O Occidente wrote that everyone wanted to call him a saint, as his friends did: São João de Deus, Saint John of God.2 sources2 sources

On Wednesday 15 January the funeral left the Estrela. Students marched behind the student band, followed by schools, academies, the press and many private people; carriages carrying envoys of the king and queen, the prime minister and several ministers came behind the pupils of the Casa Pia orphanage. Women filled the windows along the route. Outside the Jerónimos the minister of public works, for the government, and speakers for the Royal Academy of Sciences, the press and the students of Coimbra, Lisbon and Porto gave farewell speeches.2 sources2 sources

He rested at the Jerónimos for seventy years. In 1966 his remains were moved to the National Pantheon in the church of Santa Engrácia.1 source1 source

His son, João de Deus Ramos, carried the method on. He toured schools in Spain, France, Italy and Switzerland and studied Froebel, Pestalozzi and Montessori. In 1908 he had the mobile schools association add Jardins-Escolas, kindergartens for children of three to seven, to its name and aims.2 sources2 sources

The first Jardim-Escola João de Deus opened in Coimbra in 1911, followed by Figueira da Foz and Alcobaça in 1914. The Lisbon one, designed like the Coimbra school by the architect Raul Lino, took its first children in 1915. Its building and the museum beside it were inaugurated on 11 January 1917, the 21st anniversary of the poet's death.1 source1 source

Children learned to read with the Cartilha Maternal, alongside drawing, handwork, singing and games outdoors. In 2014 the forty schools of the Associação de Jardins-Escolas João de Deus, in mainland Portugal, the Azores and Madeira, were still teaching reading from his primer.2 sources2 sources

Portugal's illiteracy fell slowly for decades after his death. The First Republic (1910 to 1926) made school compulsory from 7 to 12. Salazar's Estado Novo dictatorship (1933 to 1974) cut compulsory schooling to three years, and literacy only rose quickly from the 1950s.1 source1 source