...And So Is Jane, In The Memory Of Baby-Boomer Readers. By James DiGiovanna Growing Up with Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream, by Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.). Preface by Bob Keeshan, creator of Captain Kangaroo. Paper, $11.99. THIS SLIM VOLUME of just over 100 pages attempts to use the Dick and Jane books as a platform for discussing dozens of loosely related issues in 20th-century history. Receiving a page or two of text each are: the changes in the nature of the nuclear family, tract housing, the development and subsequent demise of the idea of an innocent childhood, the effects of the baby boom on American consumerism, the 1960s challenge to white mono-culture, and a host of other topics. In a way, the book mirrors for the adult audience the simplicity of the Dick and Jane books themselves: Just as these were meant to be first readers, introducing young children to the idea that words had meanings, Growing up with Dick and Jane gives modern, attention-deficit-disordered adults a small, easily digestible sampling of ideas and analysis about the world in which they have come to live. The book is laid out like a children's version of Wired magazine, with text blocks interrupted by pictures, color fields, and other text blocks, producing an overlapping series of short, superficially related articles and vignettes. For example, each of the Dick and Jane characters is profiled in simply worded, large type stories on colored backgrounds. Interspersed throughout these pieces are short items in smaller type on white backgrounds about similar figures from real life or other media. The brightly worded section on Jane, which discusses her constantly sunny demeanor, is interrupted by two paragraphs about bossy "fussbudget" Lucy from the Peanuts comic strip, butch bad-girl Nancy of Nancy and Sluggo fame, and the lying, cheating, arsonist and murderer from The Bad Seed. The contrast could not be more obvious or more obviously drawn. On the other hand, when Growing Up deals with the genesis of the Dick and Jane books, and their link to early attempts at producing a science of the teaching of reading, it becomes genuinely interesting and novel. It seems that Dick and Jane are a product of the "whole word" theory of reading. Whole word advocates maintained that children best learn to read by decoding the word as a whole unit, and understanding its meaning from its context. Thus, the pictures illustrate what the sentences are saying. Whole word theory was developed in opposition to the phonics theory of reading, which said that sounding out the words letter by letter was the best way for children to acquire reading skills. Currently, phonics advocates are painting whole word theory advocates as products of the hippie takeover of education in the 1970s. Phonics is portrayed as the conservative, family-values approach which needs to be reasserted against the liberal, ineffective whole word system. In fact, what Growing Up points out is that whole word is an 80-year-old approach, and its partial demise in the form of the death of the Dick and Jane books is tied to the rise in social consciousness that occurred contemporaneously with the radicalism of the late '60s. Unfortunately, Growing Up doesn't deal with the current controversy, noting only that contemporary educators "favor the synthesis" of the two systems. Then again, perhaps this failure to look closely at the conflicts between reading methods is for the best, since the book tends to fall into overly brief and simple generalities when discussing anything beyond the direct history of Dick and Jane. When it sticks to its gaily colored protagonists and their many adventures and transformations, however, it offers something beyond the Reader's Digest version of contemporary social theory. One of the tastiest tidbits is the section on the Catholic version of Dick and Jane, which sums up the story "Jesus Is Here" from the "Cathedral Edition" of We Come and Go; "Mother and Father drive the family to church, where Dick and Jane and Sally will pray for Jesus' help. Spot and Puff, who'd like to go to church too, have to stay in the car." Unfortunately, there isn't that much Dick and Jane history to tell, so we are treated to such filler as a two sentence analysis of the hippie movement, half of which reads "Across the country, young people in the late 1960s gathered at love-ins to smoke marijuana, renounce capitalism and spread the doctrine of peace and love." The rest of the page is filled out with a picture of the two African-American children introduced into the Dick and Jane readers in the '60s, and a black-and-white photo of a long-haired boy and flowery girl smoking cigarettes and flashing peace signs. Get it? Whatever one thinks of the simply presented but occasionally amusing analysis of culture put forward in the text, the real reward comes at the end: Packaged into a pocket on the inside back cover is a small volume reprinting five classic Dick and Jane tales, including "Look," "See It Go," and the haunting and erotic "Something Blue for Puff."

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