An Analytic Review of:
"Growing Up with Dick and Jane" (1996)
by Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman
Reviewed by Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus,
San Diego State University
(Two subheads added by Illinois Loop editor to highlight two main themes)
This short yet revealing, highly-readable history of the rise and fall of the Scott, Foresman (SF) publishers' reading instruction textbooks of the 1920-1960s deserves to be taken seriously. The basal readers it describes were an extremely popular series of storybooks, designed for each of the elementary school grades, that supposedly became increasingly more difficult for children to read. Accompanying each book was a teacher's manual that contained directions as to how to use the stories to teach children to read. Today's basal readers closely follow that model.
The well-known basal reader series by SF thus dictated not only the content children would read, but also the teaching methodology used to develop their ability to do so. Thus, if the SF series of books was adopted, a school's reading instruction program instantly became captive to what SF's editors ordained it to be.
This tight control over school curriculum by a commercial corporation resulted in great profits for SF, and generous remuneration for education professors it hired to put the series together. These scholars' salaries could be several times the size of their university pay. Therefore, once the monies generated by the SF series became increasingly larger, a prominent financial conflict of interest was created for its academic hirelings. After this point, it was no longer permissible for them to make significant changes in the series, even if experimental research on how children best learn to read indicated that these were warranted.
The main characters of the SF texts were called Dick and Jane. The names obviously were chosen because they are single-syllable words, and are spelled predictably. Over time, the SF books became so popular that the term, Dick and Jane, was used as a metonym for basal reader series at large, including those that slavishly copied its much-favored content, rhetoric, and teaching method. By the 1950s, "80 percent" of first-grade reading programs in the nation were under the control of SF.
Dick and Jane as role models
That Dick and Jane during its heyday was both a representative and an implementer of a model popular culture is amply documented by Kismaric and Heiferman. Through copious illustrations taken from Dick and Jane, plus samples of its content, they detail how it reflected the All-American ideals of "hard work and good deeds," and that storybook characters should be role models for children. Accordingly, Dick is "adorable," a problem-solver, industrious, athletic, attentive, well-organized, courageous, polite, respectful to his elders, never teases his siblings, and "never gets into trouble" that cannot be quickly resolved.
Jane is an equally apt exemplar for girls to emulate. She is "pretty, bright and bright-eyed," as well as "stable," "responsible," and "down-to-earth," but not "prissy." She always has a "neat" appearance and is "not too fat or too thin." "Modest, poised, and unflappable," she "doesn't make mistakes," is "thoughtful to her family and friends," is "always willing to share," likes "to be one of the group," and is "helpful, generous and fair." She thus is cherished and adored by her family. "A perfect student" who is "always calm, self-controlled and free of emotional extremes," Jane is "in training to be a perfect wife and mother," it is judged.
The behavior and characteristics of Dick and Jane's mother, father, grandparents, baby sister Sally, dog Spot, kitten Puff, and teddy bear Tim, all reflect traditional family values. Those are the mores that unfortunately the passage of time since the 1960s has severely eroded. There are 38 moral lessons reinforced by Dick and Jane, it is noted, whose loss of favor in current popular culture is deplored by its critics.
Dick and Jane demonstrated for 85 million child readers from the 1930s through the 1960s the positive payback, for example, for being nice to others, being considerate, minding your manners, taking school seriously, following directions and rules, working hard at your job, helping others, and respecting your parents. This catalog of 38 virtues contrasts sharply with the growing list of complaints about the uncivil, self-centered, disobedient, and violent behavior of an increasing number of today's children.
Why, then, the decline and fall of Dick and Jane? It is obvious that in its demise, society lost a vital moral compass just at the time such a direction finder to virtue for children desperately is needed.
For one thing, educators came to ridicule what they called the stereotyped "goody-goody" child behavior emphasized in Dick and Jane. Children will gain a misleading, useless, and even bigoted impression of the realities of everyday life, it was held.
Two, feminists' derision of Dick and Jane's depiction of mother as a married housewife, and father as the family's breadwinner, was echoed by educators. This situation was held to be an intolerable deprecation of families headed by homosexuals, divorced and teen-age mothers, and foster parents.
Three, following the lead of organizations that represent minority ethnic and racial groups, educators deplored the fact that Dick and Jane were white children serving as models for behavior of children of color. They objected to the lack of multicultural content in its stories, its use of standard English, and its depictions of sexually-innocent, happy times for children. They protested that many of the 38 virtues promoted by Dick and Jane are not honored in black and Hispanic cultures. It was charged that minority children are not provided full opportunity to learn to read under these supposedly unfortunate conditions.
Four, educators were apprehensive that the 38 virtues promoted by Dick and Jane had a Judeo-Christian origin. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ("Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion") was interpreted by them to mean that all traces of religion must be banished from government schools. A ready target in that regard are children's books that reflect religious commandments regarding human behavior. Dick and Jane proved to be highly vulnerable in that respect.
The failure of look-say reading
Five, for years, SF's editors found widespread acceptance among educators for the look-say method of teaching children to read that its teachers' manuals emphasized. University of Chicago education professor, William S. Gray, the senior editor of Dick and Jane, was convinced that this whole word methodology was the best available, even though there was no support for it in the relevant experimental research when Dick and Jane was created, in 1927.
In look-say teaching, students simply gaze at written words repeatedly until it is decided they can recognize them. Gray insisted that teachers must de-emphasize instructing students to sound-out letters in words through the application of phonics rules, and to blend the speech sounds so generated to produce recognizable words, even though experimental research proves it is a more time-effective practice than the look-say procedure. Gray also advised teachers to urge students to guess at the identities of words, using sentence and picture cues, a practice that experimental research also has thoroughly discredited.
Gray ignored this empirical evidence, and in its place put his faith in experimental studies at the turn of the century that found university students could recognize whole words as rapidly as they could single letters. Why teach letters and the way they represent speech sounds (phonics rules), when whole words are identified as quickly as letters? he argued. Gray apparently never paused to reflect, Is this phenomenon also true for children learning to read? It is not. And, thus it is patently untrue that the teaching method in the Dick and Jane's teachers' manuals was "the product of a decade of experimentation," as Kismaric and Heiferman contend.
Gray's gross error about children's written word recognition was disclosed by Rudolph Flesh in 1955, in his best-selling "Why Johnny Can't Read". That point was the beginning of the end for Dick and Jane. Its teaching method was further deconstructed by Harvard education professor, Jeanne Chall, in 1967 in "Learning to Read: The Great Debate". No longer could the "beautifully printed, colorful illustrations" of Dick and Jane, nor its ethical lessons save it from eventual extinction.
It is disappointing to find that the details of Dick and Jane's teaching method cause Kismaric and Heiferman to lose their way. For example, they erroneously state that "current thinking" proposes there is a legitimate "holistic approach" to beginning reading instruction that honors both (1) direct, intensive, systematic, early, and comprehensive (DISEC) teaching of reading, and (2) children's frequent use of context and picture cues to recognize words, as the Dick and Jane teacher manuals recommend. To the contrary, able readers only rarely resort to the latter technique, experimental research confirms. Beginning readers must be discouraged from its use. Thus, Gray lagged behind the empirical evidence on context cues, rather than was "ahead" of his time "in understanding how important pictures" in stories are in teaching students to read, as the authors unwisely contend.
The authors also incorrectly aver that only advocates of the whole-word, look-say method are concerned with students' "understanding content." In actuality, DISEC teaching of reading better prepares students to read with comprehension. As well, Kismaric and Heiferman falsely report that children "unable to read effectively" in the 1930s were the victims of DISEC instruction. It furthermore is untrue that DISEC teaching is exemplified by "monotonous memory drills," and "lockstep" techniques.
The authors consequently are grossly mistaken in their conclusion that the Dick and Jane teaching method "ensured that children got all the skills they needed to read." The fact that it demonstrably did not do so was the single legitimate reason for the downfall of this series of reading instruction textbooks. The empirically discredited instructional method that Dick and Jane recommended was based on simple repetition of words. That requirement resulted in story lines that are justly criticized as linguistic atrocities. For example:
Father said, "Come, come.
Come and find something.
It is for Sally.
Come and find it."
Dick said, "I can find it."
Sally said, "I can find it."
Also, in these stories decodable words, ones spelled according to phonics rules (e.g., and, it, can) are randomly lumped together with words that are not spelled entirely predictably (father, said, come, something, find). There is no worse way to confuse beginning readers, make learning to read more difficult for them than need be, and thus soon create disabled readers. That practice is a major legitimate shortcoming of Dick and Jane. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the otherwise perceptive analysts of Dick and Jane, Kismaric and Heiferman, failed to detect it.
