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- Title
Making Dick and Jane: Historical Genesis of the Modern Basal Reader.
- Authors
Luke, Allan
- Abstract
The article examines William S. Gray and May Hill Arbuthnot's 'Dick and Jane' readers, a series of curriculum foundation texts popular with teachers for the instruction of reading in the 1960s and 1970s. The author asserts that Dick and Jane became phantom representations of a 1950s 'Everychild.' The making of what the author sees as a particular official fiction--the whitewashed world of Dick and Jane, of untroubled Progressive childhood, of the simplified nuclear family--into one of the dominant cultural mythologies of inter-and postwar generations of schoolchildren is the subject of the article. The article asserts that the Dick and Jane readers conveyed a postwar ideology of individuality and compliance with authority. A shift from the more traditional textbooks to the Dick and Jane genre is interpreted by the author as indicating a movement from the "inner-directdedness" of nineteenth-century life to the "other-directedness" of twentieth-century industrial culture.
- Subjects
FUN With Dick &; Jane (Book); ARBUTHNOT, May Hill; GRAY, William S.; SCHOOL children; CULTURAL pluralism in textbooks; DOMINANT ideologies; BASAL readers
- Publication
Teachers College Record, 1987, Vol 89, Issue 1, p91
- ISSN
0161-4681
- Publication type
Book Review
- DOI
10.1177/016146818708900107