The three Rs are three basic skills taught in schools: reading, writing and arithmetic (or reckoning; previously wroughting). The irregular initialism is based on phonetics rather than spelling. 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's Confessions: .Confessions 13:1:20 Loeb Classical Library, p. 37
The phrase is sometimes attributed to a speech given by Sir William Curtis circa 1807, but this is disputed.Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, 2008, s.v. 'R' I:3Christine Ammer, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, 2nd edition, 2013, s.v., p. 457, excerpted in The Free DictionaryJohn Limbird, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, 124 (January 22, 1823), p. 75 An extended modern version of the three Rs consists of the "functional skills of literacy, numeracy and ICT".Functional Skills
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 Traditional education Trivium (education)
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