Sold a Story - S2 E1: It’s Not Just Reading

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

In the 1960s, an education outsider named Zig Engelmann begins challenging conventional ideas about what young children can learn. He teaches his 4-year-old twins basic algebra. But he has a hard time getting anyone in education to take him seriously, until a professor gives him a chance to see if his ideas will work in a classroom.Read: What is Direct Instruction?Video: The 5 key concepts of DIVideo: Who was Zig Engelmann?Read: Transcript of this episodeSupport: Donate to APM Reports Email us: [e-mail] us: [phone]More: soldastory.org Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a weekly email newsletter from host Emily Hanford.

It's August of 1966. We're in Champaign, Illinois, in a classroom. There are seven children sitting in small chairs. One girl is so little, her feet barely touched the floor. Okay, let's do a little of these. Their teacher is perched on the edge of a stool at a blackboard, with a piece of chalk in his hand. Two, two.

Two. Eight plus two. The kids do addition. They also do subtraction and multiplication and division. Wait till you see this one. They even do some basic algebra. What if I had something as hard as this? Seven plus R.

Seven plus R equals 11. He writes it on the board. You can see the kids thinking. They're whispering to themselves, using their fingers to count. That's it. Seven plus, how many equal 11? Seven. Yeah, how'd you work that out?

You got seven. Most kids aren't taught algebra until they're in middle school, or even high school. But these kids haven't started elementary school yet. These kids are in preschool. You go into a store and you say, I want to buy a pie. And the guy said, that's right, because one four pie costs five cents. The kids help their teacher as he writes an equation on the board. It's five.

The kids figure out the answer. So our answer is, if one-board pie costs five cents, the whole pie costs 20 cents. Wow. A boy says, wow. You have to pay that much for a pie? The kids in this preschool classroom in 1966 were doing. defying all kinds of expectations. Not just because of what they were learning, but because of who they were. They were black children from a poor neighborhood, and a lot of people at the time,

and still today, expected poor black children to struggle in school. But the preschoolers you heard could do word problems and solve basic equations because they were taught how to do it. Their teacher was a man who believed all kids could learn if they were taught. He believed deeply in the power of instruction. 52, you want to do one more now? Yeah. His lessons were intense, fast-paced, tightly structured, and his way of teaching was controversial.

Critics said it was too much, that it might turn kids off to learning. But that's not how the little girl whose feet could barely touch the floor experience. I mean, I remember that like it was yesterday. Yolanda Tillman is in her 60s now. She loved the preschool and the teacher. I was just so amazed with him.

Like, here I am this little girl, and this guy is teaching us. He wasn't warm and fuzzy. He was firm. He meant business. You know, we're here to learn. Okay? And I'm going to teach you, you children, you're going to learn. And this is why we're here. We're not here for any other reason but to learn.

Yolanda says when she got to elementary school, she was way ahead of the other kids. The teachers used to be so amazed with the fact that I knew how to count by fives and how to count by tens and how, you know, how to do all these math problems. She remembers the way she was taught in the preschool as different from the rest of her education. If I had had that type of teaching throughout my life,

I don't know where it would have taken me. Like, I just feel like I would have went to a different level if I had that type of teaching going all the way through school. She thinks more schools should teach this way. But the kind of teaching Yolanda Tillman got in her preschool never caught on in American education. Something quite different took hold. I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.

I was told very clearly that we are just there to present them with materials to explore. They can teach themselves. The children should be disqualified. discovering math principles and teaching each other. Everyone is repeating this mantra of like inquiry learning is best. And the majority of our kids are two to three grade levels behind. These are all teachers who wrote to us after season one of this podcast. Season one was about how teaching kids to read went wrong.

Teachers told us it's not just reading. They said something's not right about how we're teaching math. and science and history. Something's not right about how we are teaching. I'm Emily Hanford, and this is Season 2 of Solda Story, a podcast from APM Reports. I've been an education reporter for nearly 20 years, and in all my years visiting classrooms,

talking to educators, following policy debates, I've noticed something that might sound kind of strange. In the United States, a lot of kids, people don't believe that instruction matters that much when it comes to learning. They believe other things matter more, things like the family a child grows up in, their neighborhood, their life circumstances. And don't get me wrong, those things do matter. But teaching matters too, and it can be more powerful than a lot of people realize. That's what this season of the podcast is about. Like in season one, we're going to focus on an idea about teaching and learning.

In season one, we investigated education insiders who had an idea that turned out to be wrong. This season, we're going to introduce you to an education outsider who turned out to be right. He drilled for oil. He owns some used car lots. He worked in the steel mill. He was very interested in Plato and Aristotle. I don't think he ever uttered the words social justice, but it was at the center of what he did. He really believed that all kids could learn. If the kid hasn't learned that the teacher hasn't taught it, that was our basic rule. More than 50 years ago, he got a chance to try to prove his ideas in a big government research project.

It was the largest educational experiment, at least that we know of, in the history of the world. The idea is let's try to find out what works. It didn't just evaluate different curricular, different instructional methods. It evaluated different philosophies of education. It was a contentious experiment, a messy experiment. But the government's final report indicated there was one program that stood out above the rest. This is awesome. It's going to be disseminated everywhere. That didn't happen.

There's a wide range of people against it. It doesn't fit. what they want education to be. Powerful people disputed the findings and sought to discredit them. I find no evidence in the entire evaluation that they have anything special or worthy of wide distribution. It was like a baseball bat to the head. That's what's coming up on Season 2 of Sold a Story. We have seven episodes for you.

In this first episode, I'm going to introduce you to the guy you heard doing algebra with four year olds and tell you how he went from working in a steel mill to teaching in a preschool. That's after a break. The man at the center of this story was named Sigfried Engelman. Most people called him Zig. He died in 2019 at the age of 87. You're going to hear his voice a lot in this podcast, but it's all from recordings we dug up. I never talked to him. Zieg Engelman was born in 1931, on the south side of Chicago. This is Chicago. A great empire set in the heart of America.

His father was a doctor. His mother was a nurse. But he wanted to do something different. Large machinery plants are located in Chicago because of the abundant supply of skilled labor. When he was 15, Zig lied about his age to get a job at a steel mill. And he told the foreman, he goes, give me the toughest job. I'll take it. That was his son, Owen.

And this is his son, Kurt. They put him in one of the most challenging places, taking these big red-hot pieces of steel for plows coming off of the conveyor line. Kurt and Owen are twins. Their dad liked to tell them stories about his life growing up. He was not very interested in school. He was big into being an athlete, weightlifting, bodybuilding.

He kind of loathed his way through high school. wasn't sure what to do next. Finally, a friend decided to intervene. And he took him down to the University of Illinois and said, you're going to go to school. I don't want to go to this school. This is for, you know. Zig saw himself as more of a blue-collar guy, not a college kid.

But once he embraced it, he did quite well in school. He majored in philosophy, thought that if he could understand the thinking of the great thinkers, he would be prepared to do everything. But he still didn't know what that was. He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life until the early 1960s. I was working as a marketing director for a medium-sized advertising agency, and they wanted to know how many repetitions it took for kids to learn something. This is Zig Engelman at a conference in 2008. This company that they were setting up a marketing plan for, the name was Hollywood Candy Company.

And the president of this company, he asked the question, how many repetitions it took for kids to learn something from TV. I don't want to spend this money unless I'm pretty sure that I'm going to get my monies worth. How much are we talking about? How much exposure? So I had the job of looking up in the research libraries information about how much repetition. it took. I couldn't find anything. Not a word. And so what we decided to do was get a little group of kids together and run some slogans and things by them and see how much they learn. And pretty soon, he was more interested in teaching than he was in marketing.

He just was entranced with instruction and having kids learned. He started math lessons with his twins when they were three. Oh, you want to go first? 355. The boys are four at this point. Their dad has set up a camera to film them, to show what he's taught them. Okay, Kurt's turn. Kurt has to figure out the area of a square.

We don't know how many square inches. We do some geometric problems. We do some basic algebra. Kurt remembers the lessons as challenging, but fun. So there's 36 square inches. That's fun. This was his first attempt at systematic teaching. He did do some with my older brother also.

His older brother, Eric. It was in a lesson Zig tried with Eric that he had his first major insight about teaching. If they made a mistake, it was probably my fault. This became his guiding principle. When a student doesn't understand something, it's probably not the student. That's the problem. It's probably the teaching. Here's the lesson he was doing with his son Eric when this first clicked for him.

The lesson was about telling time. He was trying to teach Eric the concept of after the hour. It was the 1960s, so it was an old-fashioned clock with an hour hand and a minute hand and a face. Zig explained to Eric, after the hour is when the minute hand is on the right side of the clock's face. Then he showed Eric examples and asked him, is this after the hour? My father kept asking and Eric kept getting the incorrect answer. Eric kept pointing to the left side of the clock's face. And after a lot of frustration, Zig suddenly realized the problem.

Eric was answering the question from the wrong perspective. He was answering the question as if he were the clock. And if you are the clock after the hour is not on the right side of your face. Picture it. If you are the clock after the hour is on the left side of your face. And so what that demonstrated in my father, was that learners can logically misinterpret your presentation. So it has to be extremely clear.

Otherwise, they will either get their wrong answer or they won't understand what it is that you're trying to teach them. Zig Engelman now knew what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to be a teacher. But more than that, he wanted to design instruction, to make instruction clear so that all kids could learn. I decided that I couldn't work in advertising anymore. I quit my job.

And he started looking for a job in education. He thought his ticket was going to be that film he made of his twins doing math. He thought there'd be a lot of interest in what he'd been able to teach them. So I made up a list of, I don't remember, 20 names of institutions that I thought would be interested in the information I had

and the knowledge that I had gained in designing instructional programs. His list included universities and educational publishers. He sent them his film. I was rejected by all of them. The only indication that anyone was the least bit interested in his film was when a guy from one of the publishing companies

asked what kind of pen he used when he wrote out the math problems for his sons to solve. And I said, it's a felt pen. So that place was a bust. But he had one more name on his list, one more educational institution to try for a job. The last place on the list was the place that seemed the most unlikely to me. It was the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children at the University of Illinois,

which was renowned and which was in the news a lot. It was one of the leading centers in the United States for studying how to help disadvantaged children do better in school. And so I figured, well, I may as well, run the course and do the last one. He sent them as film. This time, there was interest. So I tuned in and heard this thing. I was very impressed by it. This is Carl Breiter, one of the professors at the Research Institute.

He watched the film of Zig teaching his twins, and he was amazed that kids so young could do so much math. He didn't think that was possible. I just thought something's happened here that's new that we haven't seen before and should find out whether it can be replicated. He told his boss, we should give this guy Engelman a job. And they hired me as a research associate, and I was really happy. Zig Engleman started work at the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children at the University of Illinois in 1964. Here's how Carl Berriter recalls one of his first meetings with Zig. I laid out some of the experiments we had in mind, and he said,

well, why don't we just wrap them all together and start? to school. They decided to start a preschool where they would try to replicate what Zig had done with his sons. But this time, it was going to be a whole class of kids, kids who were not expected

to do well in school. The kids you heard at the beginning of this episode. How many minus 11 equal three? What's me? All righty. But what Zig Engleman was doing, the way he was teaching.

Okay, what if I did something A lot of people didn't like it. It was totally new and totally controversial. There was a terrific backlash against the program. One educator is called the approach totalitarian, another horrible. Coming up, Zig's controversial preschool and the roots of a heated debate about teaching that's still hovering over education today. That's on episode two of Solda Story.

And you don't have to wait until next week to listen to it. Episode two is available right now. This season, I'm writing a weekly email newsletter to go along with each episode of the podcast. To start off, I wrote about how we decided on the topic for season two. You can sign up for the newsletter at soldastory.org slash email. That information and a link to our website are also in the show notes. Solda Story is a podcast from APM Reports. It's reported and produced by me, Emily Hanford, with Emily Havik, Christopher Peake, Kate Martin, Olivia Chilkody, and Carmelo Wallianone. Our story editor is Curtis Gilbert.

Additional editing by Sasha Aslanian. Andy Cruz is our digital editor. Mixing, music, and sound design by Chris Julin. Fact-checking by Betsy Towner Levine. Our theme music is by the band Wonderly. Final mastering by Derek Ramirez. Our executive editor is Jane Helmke. Special thanks to Emily Corwin and the entire APM reports team.

Thanks also to Margaret Goldberg, Kate Kelly, Dan Crocker, and Annie Russell. Leadership support for Solda Story comes from Holly Hawk Foundation and Oak Foundation. Support also comes from Ibus Group, Esther A, and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Wendy and Stephen Gall, and the listeners of American Public Media.