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Growing Up with Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream

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Growing Up with Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American DreamGrowing Up with Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream by Carole Kismaric
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My mother gave this to me. I believe the thinking was that as a school teacher I would have an interest in this.

I finally got around to reading this a decade later. It is an interesting read. Dick and Jane was a Scott-Forsman reading program that developed in the 1930s and continued until 1965, although they continued printing until 1970. The series was based on whole word recognition and not phonics. This was a bit confusing as it seemed as though there was a phonics component to the program to help students sound out the words.

While this was not the program I was taught in school, we had Dick and Jane books on the shelves at home.

This book presented the history of the series with a lot of what was going on in the US during the different decades. I found some mistakes, albeit minor ones. For instance in the discussion of the 1960s,
Teenagers never knew what they were going to see or hear: Laugh-In or another assassination, Love Story or Easy Rider . . .
The problem here is that Love Story was not published in the 1960s. 😉

Nevertheless, for someone interested in the series and how it mirrored American society during its four-decade run, this is an interesting read.

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