Word: foresman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Publishers are facing comparable pressures in Brookline, Mass., Detroit, Seattle, Dallas, Atlanta and New York City. Major textbook packagers such as Ginn, Silver Burdett, Houghton Mifflin, Harper & Row and Scott, Foresman have all been singled out. And there are indications that some of them have begun thinking about costly reform projects to eliminate stereotyping, just as they have already expunged, in some cases, editorial sins against blacks...
...Real Dent. For its authors and editors, Scott, Foresman has prepared a detailed leaflet called Guidelines for Improving the Image of Women in Textbooks. Among these guidelines are suggestions like "Avoid constructions implying that women, because they are women, are always dependent on male initiative." For example, rather than stating "The ancient Egyptians allowed women considerable control over property," a historian is requested to write: "Women in Egypt had considerable control over property." Macmillan and several other major publishers are revamping their textbooks, but no real dent has yet been made in their backlists, where sexism infects thousands of titles...
RELEVANCE. More than half the nation's adults were drilled on numbing incantations of the Dick and Jane readers ("See Dick run. See Jane run."). Born in 1931 to Scott, Foresman & Co. of Glenview, Ill., Dick and Jane inspired competing publishers to beget their own families of white, suburban, middle-class Pollyannish imitations: Alice and Jerry, Mark and Janet, Jack and Jean. Now those ninnies are slowly being phased out. With a fanfare of press conferences last fall, Scott, Foresman launched new "reading systems" primers with an interracial cast of characters who change from story to story. Subjects...
LINGERING "LOOK-SAY." In the new Scott Foresman program, the children begin with simple pictures and simple captions ("A girl got on a bus"). Told that the words say what the picture shows, the kids have little trouble "reading" the sentence aloud. Under the teacher's guidance, they soon recognize and recall more new words each...
Since adults decode printed words largely by familiarity with their shapes and placement in sentences, the Scott, Foresman authors argue that children should start the same way and later add systematic phonics, which involves the teaching of sounds of individual letters, diphthongs and the like. In short, the old "look-say" reading method has survived in new forms despite all the critics who prefer phonics from the start. On balance, says Dr. Carl Smith of Indiana University's Reading and Evaluation Center, "Many of our traditional approaches have been successful with many children, but chiefly those with normal cultural...