Couch Communiqué

As a child in the 1960s, I learned to read with the Dick and Jane series of books.

The readers were based on the “whole word” or “look-say”, also called sight reading, method of reading. This method taught children to look at each word as a whole unit. Educators felt students could recognize the word “house” or “down” more easily than they could sound it out.

Opinions began to change in the mid 1950s with experts questioning the “look-say” method. Educators felt a more efficient method was to teach reading using phonics. This approach and other societal changes eventually spelled the end of the Dick and Jane series.

The readers were widely used in classrooms in the United States and in other English-speaking countries for nearly four decades and reached the height of their popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students in the United States were learning to read though these stories.

The books pictured here are from the heavily revised titles released in 1962. These books had a larger page size, new and updated artwork, some shortened stories from previous editions, and a large portion of new stories.

The last Dick and Jane series was published in 1965.