The three Rs

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The three Rs are the basic school skills: reading, writing, and arithmetic. The initials come from how the words sound, not how they’re spelled, and the phrase started in the early 1800s. The idea goes back to Saint Augustine, who wrote about learning to read, write, and count.

Some say Sir William Curtis mentioned it around 1807, but that isn’t certain. Today, many people use a broader version: literacy, numeracy, and ICT (computing). Another educator, Louis P. Bénézet, suggested “to read, to reason, to recite”—with reciting meaning speaking clear English, not just repeating words.