In public schools, the English language has long been subordinated to the classics. The first schools for the poor focused on teaching children to read the Bible. Later, they aimed to teach them the minimum skills of reading, writing, and encryption that would suit them for modest and rewarding employment in the short term before they went to work. Spoken language plays a central role in learning. By talking to their children, parents help them find words to express their needs, feelings and experiences. With the help of language, children can turn their active reaction to the environment into a more accurate form and learn to manipulate it more economically and effectively. Schools tried to make speaking a separate subject, a conversation lesson, and a period of "news"; there were many schools where the day was played in games, accompanied by conversations between the teacher and the children, both individuals and groups, and sometimes the whole class. Traditionally, one of the first tasks of primary school was to teach children to read, because reading was the key to most learning and to the possibility of independent learning. In many primary schools, reading and writing were treated as an extension of spoken language. The children were introduced to reading the daily events and the atmosphere in the classroom. Notices of return home, letters to sick children, signs to return materials and tools to the proper place - all encouraged reading and writing. The children, together with the teachers, developed homemade books, which they then read individually or in small groups. These books helped them see the meaning of reading and understand the purpose of written writings. As for modern languages, for many years in primary schools there have been sporadic, individual and rather inconsistent attempts to teach children, almost always French. The age at which boys in independent preparatory schools started Latin and French showed that there were no fundamental difficulties in learning a second language, at least for some younger students. It was unknown whether a second language could be taught to all or most children. Typically, these experiments were dedicated to the most gifted children in the fourth year of primary school, and were conducted through the appearance among the staff of someone who was well "fluent" or "loved" the French language.
The teaching of English in public primary schools in Mexico: More heat than light?