Idealists generally agree that many educational materials used by students are inadequate. Although the materials might help teach such skills as reading, idealists do not understand why such skills cannot be taught in ways that also develop conceptual ability. One might argue that the McGuffey reader, widely used in schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taught the student something in addition to reading; they fostered ideas about parental relationships, God,morality, and patriotism. A counterargument might be that these are the wrong kinds of concept, but are the more recent sterile readers used in schools an improvement?