The three Rs are three basic skills taught in schools:
reading
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of symbols, often specifically those of a written language, by means of Visual perception, sight or Somatosensory system, touch.
For educators and researchers, reading is a multifacete ...
,
writing
Writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of language. A writing system includes a particular set of symbols called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language. Every written language ...
and
arithmetic
Arithmetic is an elementary branch of mathematics that deals with numerical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In a wider sense, it also includes exponentiation, extraction of roots, and taking logarithms.
...
", Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic 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
Augustine of Hippo ( , ; ; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430) was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings deeply influenced the development of Western philosop ...
's ''
Confessions'': 'learning to read, and write, and do arithmetic'.
The phrase is sometimes attributed to a speech given by
Sir William Curtis circa 1807: this is disputed. An extended modern version of the three Rs consists of the "functional skills of literacy, numeracy and
ICT".
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."
[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)]
See also
*
Standards based education reform
Education reform in the United States since the 1980s has been largely driven by the setting of academic standards for what students should know and be able to do. These standards can then be used to guide all other system components. The SBE (sta ...
*
Traditional education
Traditional education, also known as back-to-basics, conventional education or customary education, refers to long-established customs that society has traditionally used in schools. Some forms of education reform promote the adoption of progress ...
*
Trivium (education)
The trivium is the lower division of the seven liberal arts and comprises grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
The trivium is implicit in (" On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury") by Martianus Capella, but the term was not used until the Caro ...
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Three Rs, The
Education reform
Latin words and phrases