The three Rs (as in the letter R) are[1] the foundations of a basic skills-orientated education program within schools: Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic.
The phrase is attributed to a toast given by Sir William Curtis around 1825.[2] Since its original creation, many others have created new words for what the Rs stand for.
There is an earlier reference to "reading, writing, and arithmetic." It comes from Saint Augustine's "The Confessions of Saint Augustine" AD 401, Book I - Translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey. "For those first lessons, reading, writing and arithmetic, I thought as great a burden and penalty as any Greek."
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The phrase 'the three Rs' is used because each word in the phrase has a strong R phoneme (sound) at the beginning. The term is ironic, since someone with a firm education in the subjects would know that two of the original words do not actually begin with an R. The third R was more probably Reckoning, not as is more usually stated 'Rithmetic. Reckoning was a Victorian term for mental arithmetic and had been in use as such since the 14th Century[3]. Newer versions of the three Rs include Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - which is a popular theme in environmentalism (alternatively, there is a fourth "R" in environmentalism, which is Repair) - and Read, Write, Recite. 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."[4]
Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Terry Bergeson, has identified the new 3 Rs from Robert Carkhuff's 3 Rs as Relating, Representing and Reasoning.[5] Carkhuff was a self-published consultant paid $1 million to provide materials to help design Washington State's controversial standards based education reform program. Terry Bergeson has pledged that that all would receive world class standards diplomas, yet one half of all students and three-quarters of minority students are on track to have their diplomas revoked in 2008 because they do not pass the new 3 Rs standard set by the WASL standards based assessment. While over half of US students will be required to pass similar High school graduation examinations, because of objections from parents and education experts, no more states have adopted such requirements and some have dropped them in 2006. Advocates of the traditional education question how students who struggle with basic skills can be expected to be more successful at higher developmental higher order thinking levels. States like California abandoned similar standards in the late 1990s in favor of returning to basic skills.