IN THE ANNALS OF AMERICAN
EDUCATION,
the universally loathed Dick and Jane readers, with their hideous Wasp
families and moronic stories of lost kittens and friendly neighborhood
policemen, were supposed to have been routed by the Dr. Seuss rebellion
of the 1950s. Yet Dick and Jane lived on into the early sixties, even
in progressive, upper-middle class schools like Burr Farms, the one
I attended in Westport Connecticut. Whether it was sheer inertia or fear of
the Cat in the Hat's raging id that kept these books in circulation, I don't
know, but I'm glad my teachers continued to use them when I was in the first
and second grades. I don't find them boring, trite, banal, depressing, and
oppressive, though I wouldn't deny they were all those things and worse. To
me the Dick and Jane readers were as beautiful and romantic as the the
Arthurian legends or the tales of Ali Baba might have been to a more
imaginatively disposed child. All those rosy-cheeked, Aryan children,
their young, cheerful Dads casually dressed in white shirt and tie
(no jacket!), their uncomplaining Moms always wearing aprons and working
like drones in the kitchen—how utterly different they were from my own
family and friends in genteel, lily white Westport. In Westport there was
stress and turmoil, the ugly and noisy Post Road ran behind our house,
the pond beyond my school was drained for a housing development, my friends
beat me up, my mother didn't like washing the dishes. There was
another land, though, where children owned ponies, where apples glistened
like watercolors (they were watercolors), where healthy, happy
grandparents were still alive, where families took Sunday outings in big,
old-fashioned cars: Ohio. Why I determined Dick, Jane, Sally,
Peter, Ellen, Patty, Baby, and Big Bill the police officer had to
live in Ohio is a little unclear, but it was a conveniently exotic
place with a name that sounded like an incantation; anyway, it
was far from Westport. According to the Scott, Foresman
Company's promotional literature, "these were top-notch stories,"
"lively, humorous, well-rounded," "a stimulus to wide-awake reading." I'm
not sure I saw it that way. Though I recognized nothing in them as
belonging to my own world, I took the stories with fantastic
seriousness. The bizarre, Gertrude Stein-like rhythms further heightened
the atmosphere of supra-reality:
Spot ran to Peter and Ellen.
"Bow-wow, bow-wow," he said.
Jane said, "This is our dog, Spot.
He wants to say hello.
He wants to say hello to our new friends."
And yet somewhere, out in mythopoeic Ohio,
people like Dick and Jane and animals like Spot and Puff (the cat) might
probably exist. Fantasy and reality, I'm afraid, were fatally confused
in my six-year-old mind, and I still haven't quite sorted them out. But a
gleaming world of beautiful surfaces had been revealed to me, and the goal
of education, I imagined, was to obtain that world. Not a healthy precedent.
Well, the Dick and Jane books are an
easy target, and I'm taking my shots only to make the not very startling point
that in America our ideas about education are tied to our assumptions about
class. You are, as Paul Fussell said, Where you went. I went to Glassboro
State College.
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